Practice Areas

In the early 80’s, pursuant to the Government’s policy of promoting Singapore as a regional financial centre, Singapore was able to attract many top global banks to open branches in Singapore. However, when the banks started doing business, it was felt that not enough Singaporean lawyers (at that time) had the experience of acting in complicated cross border deals or were familiar with the market practice in London or New York. As such the government was persuaded to allow Freshfields to be the only international law firm that was allowed to practice Singapore law and employ Singapore qualified lawyers (which included two of our pioneer directors).

It is probably because of this historical fact that TPC Law presently acts for many international banks. As each of these banks specialises in different products and provides different kinds of banking services, our banking lawyers have experience in almost all areas of finance work (both local as well as regional).

TPC Law is perhaps most well-known for its Banking & Finance Practice. Being on the panel of all the local banks, and acting regularly for more than 20 offshore banks, we continue to be involved in the latest variety of loan, structured and specialty finance, distressed trade transactions, debt restructuring and rescheduling, documentation and instruments. The Department has a wide network of local and international clients, including originators, lenders, borrowers, issuers, participants, purchasers and intermediaries.

Our Banking & Finance Department handles:

• Acquisition finance, asset finance, corporate finance, project and development finance
• Structured trade and commodity financing
• Bilateral and syndicated lending
• Ship financing
• Private banking 
• Certificates of deposit, bonds, commercial paper and other money markets instruments
• Debt recovery and security enforcement
• Workouts, debt restructuring and rescheduling
• Derivative transactions including ISDA documentation
• Compliance and regulatory issues
• Formation of Singapore branches and representative offices of foreign banks and bank holding companies

TPC Law has also been providing Singapore Law expertise to member banks of the Federal Association of German Banks (Bundesverband deutscher Banken e.V.) on Singapore security interests (for implementation of Basel standards) since 2008.

For a detailed capability statement of our Banking & Finance practice, please contact the following Directors: