Venture scouts

Camille Abousleiman was based in New York in the early ’90s and was running a thriving Latin American practice advising clients in Brazil, Argentina and beyond. Then the so-called ‘Tequila Crisis’ hit in 1994: a sudden devaluation of the Mexican peso caused a currency catastrophe that killed Abousleiman’s practice overnight. ‘I remember we had about 15 large capital markets transactions on the go at the time, and they all just stopped dead,’ he says.

But Abousleiman, now a partner in the London office of Dewey & LeBoeuf, is the archetypal rainmaker, and as one region crumbled, he hunted out the next geographic gold mine. He began making trips to the country where he had grown up. ‘I packed my bags and went to Lebanon,’ he recalls. ‘I toured the local banks and met with the government, and I talked to them about the capital markets, which at that stage hadn’t really hit the Middle East.’

He arrived at a time when there hadn’t been a single bond issue out of the region, and before any of the large investment banks had woken up to the opportunity. The result? In 1995 ‘the floodgates opened’, he says, and in 1996 he relocated to London. His deal book reads like a list of firsts, kicking off with debut sovereign bond issues for Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, and more recently including work on the $840m IPO of Telecom Egypt, the largest international public offering out of the Middle East and North Africa. Last year he acted for Investcom on its $770m IPO on the Dubai International Financial Exchange, which was the first listing on the market, and then on its $5.5bn combination with the MTN Group.

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