Deborah Festa

Partner

Deborah Festa is a partner in O'Melveny's Los Angeles office and a member of the Investment Funds & Securitization Practice. She is a member of O’Melveny’s firm-wide Associate and Counsel Review Committee, and has served on the Firm’s Senior Management Committee and the Los Angeles office Employment Committee.

In its “Structured Finance: Securitization” category, The Legal 500 (2009) cites her focus on complex securitization transactions and praises her as “effective” with “a strong can-do attitude.” She also has been recognized as a "Future Star of America" by The Times (London).

Deborah advises investment managers, financial institutions, hedge funds, and other market participants in a range of strategies and transactions employing a variety of financing techniques and vehicles.

Illustrative Professional Experience

Structured Finance:

• Securitizations, complex domestic and off-shore financing arrangements, repackagings, and redemptions/unwinds involving financial assets in a variety of asset classes, with a particular emphasis on cash flow, market value, and synthetic CLO/CDO/CBO transactions
• Strategic counseling and problem-solving in high-stakes conflicts among transaction participants
• Representative clients: KKR Asset Management; BNY Mellon specialty investment management companies; AIG Global Investments
• Illustrative experience: Represented KKR Asset Management in all of its cash flow CLO transactions, including a market value deal conversion and a transaction that was one of the largest non-bank arbitrage CLO transactions on record in any market, with an initial issuance size of over $3.5 billion

Investment Funds:

• Formation and capitalization of private and publicly-listed investment funds with U.S. and non-U.S. investors for investment in a variety of asset classes, including leveraged loans, securities, and domestic and foreign real estate
• Negotiation of management fee and carried interest arrangements
• Secondary transactions involving the purchase and sale of investment fund interests
• Illustrative experience: Represented a major Southern California real estate developer in structuring and admitting to the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange a fund created to invest in and develop a portfolio of properties in Vietnam and Cambodia

Investment Manager Acquisitions:

• Strategic acquisition, sale, and sub-advisory transactions involving investment managers and their management contracts
• Illustrative experience: Represented Alcentra, a BNY Mellon specialty investment management company, in its acquisition of the U.S. CLO business of Rabobank Nederland

Structured Products and Derivatives:

• Structured products investments and transactions involving hedging arrangements, credit default swaps, and derivative product companies
• Illustrative experience: Represented a prominent investment manager as reference portfolio manager in several series issuances of credit-linked notes in a major investment bank-sponsored synthetic CDO program

General Corporate:

• Broad-based corporate experience representing publicly-traded and privately-held companies in connection with public offerings, acquisitions and divestitures, public and private equity investments, and joint ventures
• Advice to senior management and boards of publicly-traded companies on SEC compliance, public reporting, and corporate governance matters

Professional Activities

Author, “Industry Insight - CLO Restructurings,” The Deal (April 2009)
Language, French
Board Member and Vice President, Southern California Phi Beta Kappa Alumni Society