ASAR - Al Ruwayeh and Partners, a leading Bahrain corporate law firm, took part in a debt capital market forum recently organised by the Gulf Bond and Sukuk Association.

The forum, titled ‘Debt Capital Market Opportunities for Mid-sized Companies, The Next Wave?’ was was designed to get leading industry professionals together to discuss the latest developments relating to regional debt capital markets.

Simone Del Nevo, associate at the Manama office of ASAR with extensive experience assisting issuers in stand-alone bond issues and the establishment of issue programmes, participated in the panel covering the fundamental elements that go into a successful corporate bond/sukuk transaction.

The topics addressed included disclosure for debut issuers tapping debt capital markets as an alternative source of funding to bank lending and touched upon disclosure obligations arising from applicable regulation and from established market practices.

Debut issuers were urged to adopt a structured approach in managing disclosure by defining and establishing corporate processes that would allow the issuer to expeditiously and accurately retrieve all relevant information from the various business units and for senior management to be best positioned to make important decisions as to what meets the materiality rule that is typically found in disclosure regulations.

“Adopting a structured and disciplined approach to managing disclosure would likely yield tremendous benefits in terms of costs, by reducing the overall amount of time that internal and external resources would otherwise spend in coping with disclosure, in terms of speed of execution, by allowing the company to seize windows of opportunity as and when they open up and, last but not least, in terms of risk management by ensuring accuracy of disclosures made in offering documents and elsewhere in the course of a Debt Capital Markets issue,” Del Nevo added. - TradeArabia News Service