Amid growing interest on the part of Canadian financiers and sponsors in opportunities in Africa, Gowlings has expanded its corporate finance and mining practice with the addition of an experienced partner from Norton Rose Fulbright.
Avril Cole, who is qualified to practice law in Ontario and New York, is the newest partner in Gowlings’s Toronto office. Cole represents Canadian and global clients undertaking cross-border deals involving natural resources, which Cole identifies as a key element in Africa’s growth story over the last decade. Cole’s practice is expanding as even countries in Africa without natural resource-based economies flourish. Cole identifies Kenya and Rwanda as two countries exemplifying this trend.
“Kenya has very strong service and tourism sectors and is an emerging technological hub. Rwanda similarly is positioning itself to become a telecommunications hub for Eastern Africa,” Cole said. “The enormous infrastructure deficit across the continent including in the area of power, also presents interesting opportunities. We are seeing increasing foreign investment in infrastructure projects which offer a reasonable rate of return, particularly where they involve public-private partnerships,” she added.
Cole told IFLR1000 that she and her colleagues are leveraging the experience and relationships that the firm’s Canadian and U.K. teams have accrued in the course of advising clients active in oil and gas in Africa’s civil and common law jurisdictions. This experience leads to opportunities as counsel to clients operating in other sectors in Africa, such as power.
“We have a leading power practice in Canada with significant experience in electricity transmission, having worked on multiple projects and acquisitions over the years and we are looking to leverage that experience in supporting our clients who are accessing the electricity market in Africa,” Cole stated.
Nevertheless, junior mining companies undertaking cross-border transactions face significant challenges, not the least of which involves access to equity capital. In Cole’s view, the worst-impacted companies are the single-commodity producers with significant price risk exposure. Many of these companies, Cole observed, are putting their projects on care and maintenance.
“For juniors, survival will continue to depend on exploring innovative financing options including royalty streaming and positioning for private equity and where it makes sense, considering project-level joint ventures,” Cole said.
“Having said this, those junior companies that are able to obtain financing will continue to advance high quality pre-production assets with the long-term view of divestment when the cycle shifts back towards higher commodity prices,” she added.
Cole said that the pace of private capital investments in the mining sector at last looks poised to increase, in the context of a stabilizing commodity price outlook.
“Speaking to our own experience, we are two weeks into the new year and our private equity team is already fielding calls from a variety of private capital groups looking to raise and/or deploy capital to make investments in undervalued and/or distressed pre-production or producing mining assets,” she added.
Cole obtained her law degree at Wolverhampton University.