Pinsent Masons hires a 23-person team for Luxembourg

Pinsent Masons hires a 23-person team for Luxembourg

Pinsent Masons brings in seven new partners, including Michel Bulach, who will lead the newly established Luxembourg office of Pinsent Masons. It has hired 23 attorneys from the nearby independent Wildgen, which has dissolved presently.

With the acquisition, Pinsent Masons will hire 16 additional attorneys in addition to seven new partners, with the Luxembourg office's primary area of expertise being the financial services industry.

With customers in Ireland, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and the UK, the new office-Pinsent Mason's ninth in Continental Europe—will be run by former Wildgen partner Michel Bulach.

According to Richard Foley, a senior partner at Pinsent Masons, Luxembourg is a significant economic and trading hub on the international stage. By extending into the area, we will be better positioned to serve clients that work in our key industries across all of continental Europe and will be better able to provide cross-border knowledge.

The partners and other employees who have joined us in Luxembourg form a highly qualified team with a solid reputation in the market, he continued.

In 2000, Bulach joined Wildgen as an associate and rose to partner in 2005, working there for more than two decades. Bulach specialises on regulatory issues, capital markets, complex finance deals, insurance and reinsurance and bank lending.

Giuseppe Cafiero, Isabelle Charlier, David Maria, Yann Payen, Eric Perru and Mark Shaw are the additional new partners. Giuseppe Cafiero, an expert in banking, finance, insurance, and reinsurance law, joins after serving Wildgen for 11 years. Corporate law, corporate finance and commercial law are the main areas of Charlier's work. With the exception of a brief 19-month absence spent working at the Centralis Group, she has been with Wildgen since 2007. Maria joined Wildgen in 2008 after serving as a senior associate at Oostvogels Pfister Feyten, where she specialised in corporate and tax law.

Payen, meantime, offers guidance on corporate law and M&A transactions as well as experience with international restructurings. Perru offers legal advice on civil, financial, and commercial disputes. Shaw also provides guidance on how to structure and distribute both controlled and uncontrolled funds. He will travel to London and concentrate on creating connections between the UK clients of the firm and Luxembourg.

"Pinsent Masons has a robust European network that is renowned for its flawless connectivity. We are now one of the few companies with skills that cover the region in this way thanks to the expansion of our location in Luxembourg. We debut as a full-service organisation in addition to providing a solid financial services offering thanks to the depth of experience among our Luxembourg partners," according to Bulach.

After the team moved to Pinsents, Wildgen, a reliable mid-sized corporation in Luxembourg's financial district, was shut down, with three partners transferring somewhere else with their teams.

Lionel Bonifazzi, a business partner, and Mevlüde-Aysun, a finance and investment funds expert

Tokbag, who co-headed Wildgen's banking and finance and investment funds teams, has joined local firm KleyrGrasso, Bonifazzi to start a tax team in addition to former Wildgen director Valeria Ercolini and Tokbag, who co-headed Wildgen's German desk.

Karine Vilret, meanwhile, has joined the Luxembourg branch of German law firm Luther. She was previously the head of the business's conflict resolution and litigation practise.

After allegedly disagreeing over strategy with the firm's other 10 partners, François Brouxel, the former managing partner of Wildgen and Samia Rabia, the former senior partner, left the company in December to start their own boutique.

Following Addleshaw Goddard's entrance in March, when it poached corporate partner Richard Ledain Santiago from UK rival Fieldfisher to oversee the office, Pinsents opened its doors in Luxembourg.

Through a merger with local firm Volckrick & Associates, US firm K&L Gates also established a presence in the area last summer. As a result, three new attorneys were added to the business's global roster, including partner Mathieu Volckrick.