We can pack in some serious substance on a Friday (not necessarily everyone’s peak time for absorbing a nuanced discussion on complex financial products). Here’s a recap of original substantive pieces from recent issues for easy reference.
The subscription facility market has for ages included an event of default trigger tied to a certain percentage threshold of investors failing to timely fund their capital calls. We illustrate the link between such a Cumulative Default EOD threshold and an overcall limit in the LPA, and how the overcall limit should inform the appropriate Cumulative Default EOD percentage.
Traditionally, subscription finance facilities treat investors in two ways. For “regular” investors, they are either included or excluded from the borrowing base or leverage covenants depending on their financial status and/or their behaviour as investors. For investors which are also GPs or managers, the concerns are more around a change of control of the GP or manager or something worse (for example, a voluntary or even compulsory removal of a GP or manger and whether there is an acceptable replacement). But what happens where the investor (including the GP or manager) is not itself a substantive entity and is simply a vehicle for and reliant on another entity?
In the not-too-distant past, execution of a major commercial transaction involved gathering the parties (and their lawyers) in a large conference room to sign (with a pen!) multiple counterparts of a suite of documents, each dutifully arranged by a junior staffer. The pomp and circumstance of the previous era’s closing rooms have given way to more efficient, convenient and cost-effective methods. Today’s closings are typically uneventful, digital affairs—conducted from participants’ respective offices (or on-the-go via mobile devices) and made possible in part by the advent of digital and electronic signatures. The latter category (think DocuSign, as opposed to PDFs or faxes) gives rise to questions of validity and enforcement.