De Brauw has won the Deal of the Year Award in the category Restructuring at the 26^th annual IFLR Europe Awards 2025. The IFLR Awards celebrates the legal industry’s most innovative work, with a special focus on cutting-edge achievements in cross-border transactions. Each year, IFLR honours the deals, teams, and firms that push boundaries and set new standards in legal practice.

De Brauw advised and represented an ad hoc group of secured financiers (the LC Group) in a combined Dutch WHOA process, UK restructuring plan and US Chapter 15 proceedings for McDermott - the global engineering and construction company that entered into parallel restructuring proceedings in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in 2023.

The Dutch WHOA plans formed a critical component of the cross-border restructuring involving: (i) the amendment and extension of over EUR 2 billion of letters of credit facilities and certain other secured credit facilities by three years; and (ii) the conversion of an unsecured claim of EUR 1.3 billion held by Colombian oil refinery company Reficar under an ICC arbitration award, into equity in the McDermott Group. Following the recognition of the Dutch WHOA plans and the UK restructuring plan in the US under Chapter 15, the plans can also be enforced against creditors in the US. The sanctioning of the Dutch WHOA plans, the UK restructuring plan, as well as the Chapter 15 recognition of the plans, were a condition precedent for the entire global restructuring, which closed on 25 March 2024.

The restructuring's key features included using the Dutch WHOA for a US-based multinational; fully aligning and interlinking the proceedings in the Netherlands and the UK; and the Amsterdam District Court appointing a plan expert at the request of the LC Group. The latter was done to bring more balance to the WHOA plans as presented by McDermott and a large group of its secured creditors and shareholders. The LC Group's request to appoint a plan expert was supported by Reficar. Following several litigation rounds in courts in the Netherlands and the UK (decisions which have been published), the WHOA plans were revised to better reflect the interests of the joint creditors. As a result, the revised plans were widely supported and no creditors voted against them.

The De Brauw team advising the LC Group on this transaction consisted of Ferdinand Hengst, Jeroen van der Schrieck, Ryanne Elkerbout-Kok, Pepijn van der Veen, Maartje Leijser and Walter Nijnens. De Brauw's restructuring team are experts in designing and negotiating complex, international high-impact debt and other restructurings, and in dealing with related litigation and advisory work.

More information about the IFLR Awards can be found at https://www.iflr.com/iflr-awards-homepage.