John Dewar, partner in the Project Finance Group, resident in the firm's London office, was a panelist at the 15th Annual ECA Conference in Barcelona, Spain. The conference was held September 9-10, 2014. John's panel included Vineyesh Sawhney, Head of Financial Resources and Senior Vice President – Finance, Reliance Industries Limited; Dr. Hendrik Holdefleiss, Head of Division Underwriting & Risk Management, Export Credit Guarantees, Euler Hermes; Sang-Jin Kim, Head of Project Finance Department, KSURE; and Manav Futnani, Director - Project & Export Finance, HSBC (panel moderator).
The panel's topics included:
- Understanding the unique challenges associated with involving 12 ECAs in a single financing programme
- How RIL worked with ECAs and banks to structure facilities that efficiently allowed them to finance a large number of small contracts with SME exporters
- Replicating the RIL model: how other large corporations can replicate RIL's ECA financing model
- What ECAs and banks need to do to encourage more large corporations like RIL to use of ECA financing
