White & Case’s aggressive sweep on the City lateral market has continued with the hire of Herbert Smith Freehills infrastructure partner Simon Caridia.
The high-profile Caridia joined Herbert Smith as a partner in May 2015 from Magic Circle firm Linklaters, where he worked for nearly ten years, latterly for two years as counsel. He started his career at CMS, and is expected to start at White & Case by the end of the year.
White & Case’s thirteenth lateral this year alone, Caridia advises on both greenfield and brownfield transactions, focusing on debt financings for infrastructure M&A and private equity transactions. He will join the global project finance practice, and counts infrastructure investors Arcus, Goldman Sachs, OMERS and DIF among his clients, as well as major European sponsors including Strabag, Skanska, Acciona and Hochtief.
While at Herbert Smith he worked on some high-profile transactions, including advising the commercial banks and the European Investment Bank on the €800 million financing of the IJmond Sea Lock PPP project in the Netherlands, which reached financial close in October 2015.
At Linklaters he led a team advising the lenders on the £1.2bn financing of the UK’s M25 motorway expansion project, a PFI that made it over the line in 2009 in spite of the financial crisis.
White & Case has been on something of a whirlwind in the City, having gone full steam ahead with its NY-London focus and ambitions to go ‘toe-to-toe’ with the Magic Circle in London as part of a 2020 plan led by Oliver Brettle, member of the global executive committee and former London executive partner.
Already this month, the firm snapped up a Weil, Gotshal & Manges counsel Thomas Falkus as a partner for its thriving capital markets practice and also added David Robertson, formerly of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, to its arbitration practice.
Other recent hires include Royal Bank of Scotland’s former head of litigation and investigations Laura Durrant as a partner, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft litigation partner Steven Baker for the firm’s commercial litigation practice.
nathalie.tidman@legalease.co.uk
For more on White & Case’s expansion strategy, read: Reborn supremacy – inside the unlikely White & Case revolution