Elena Solovyeva-Managing Partner
Elena is an intuitive lawyer with a hands-on approach and over 18 years of international legal experience. She is both a qualified Russian Advocate and a Solicitor in England & Wales. Elena possesses a unique skillset in both contentious and non-contentious matters gained from practising at City law firms for over 14 years. She handles a broad contentious workload advising on complex commercial litigation, insolvency disputes and fraud in English courts. In addition, Elena assists clients to manage their international matrimonial disputes, tax and corporate transactions.
In the course of this work, Elena has gained extensive experience in working with ultra-high-net-worth individuals to structure their assets in trusts and to mitigate their UK personal and corporate tax liability. As well as working in England, Elena has significant experience of working as part of a cross-border teams in jurisdictions such as Russia, Ukraine, Cyprus, Malta, British Crown Dependencies and the United States. Elena is a native Russian and fluent English speaker. She also has basic reading skills in Ukrainian and French.
Elena previously practised at Withers, acting for ultra-high net worth individuals and companies in structuring their assets, and Gateley Plc in London, acting for governments and corporates and managing a high-value complex litigation workload.
Recent notable cases:
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Acted for the government body of a former Soviet Union republic responsible for winding up operations of insolvent banks to investigate a substantial fraud arising from the demise of two large banks. Total loss is around £170m.
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Acted in a range of matters for a UK insolvency claims acquisition firm bringing claims in breach of directors’ duties where creditors’ interests were engaged, including recently successfully achieving a multi-million settlement (which was significantly higher than expected by the client) in one of the matters, and brining another case that was rigorously contested by the defendants, to a mediation and a multi-million settlement by significantly increasing the value of the claim following the new evidence and by adding pressure.
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Acted for trustees in bankruptcy involving a UK domiciled bankrupt with a complex estate and assisted with managing proceedings in Malta, including a successful UK bankruptcy recognition application (which was first precedent in Malta of this kind).
Elena is very efficient and brings excellent results to her clients with a 100% success rate in litigation to date.
Janko Nikolic - Counsel
Janko’s practice centers on advising clients on complex project finance and development, corporate/mergers and acquisitions (M&A), energy/resources, public-private partnerships (PPPs), and foreign direct investment (FDI) matters.
Janko is a senior triple-qualified English/Australian/Serbian lawyer who has advised clients on some of the most significant infrastructure projects and corporate/M&A deals in Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe. He has also published several articles in legal journals and legal publications, and has lectured on corporate law, corporate governance, and legal risk management at one of the world’s top universities.
Relevant experience:
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Advised publicly listed companies from the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia on PPP, FDI and M&A in a broad variety of cross-border transactions.
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Advised a leading company from the UAE on a port infrastructure project in South East Europe.
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Advised on a multi-billion acquisition in Central and Eastern Europe during a secondment to a leading ‘magic circle’ multinational law firm.
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Advised a consortium of international lenders on financing of a major airport concession in Southeast Europe.
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Advised a multinational private gas company on FDI possibilities in Southeast Europe including due diligence and preparing a legal risk assessment report.
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Advised a leading global consulting firm on legal risk assessment and FDI matters involving a major resources company in Southeast Europe.
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Advised a large Chinese state-owned company on a PPP motorway concession project in Southeast Europe.
Andrew Terry - Consultant
Andrew has extensive experience as a tax lawyer for over 40 years in City and Central London law firms at a senior partner level for most of that time. Andrew works with clients in a wide range of industry sectors including transportation (ships and aircraft), hotels, wealth management, construction, pharmaceuticals, food retail, corporate strategy/lobbying, oil and gas as well as mining. This work has involved an extensive range of areas including pure tax advice (both UK domestic and international), M&A, debt and equity finance and capital markets as well as personal tax advice for UBOs. Andrew's portfolio of clients involves most major jurisdictions including most of Europe, the countries of the former Soviet Union as well as the US and Canada with exposure to transactions in the Far East, Africa and South America. Andrew is also a non-executive director of Altyn Gold PLC, a main market LSE listed gold mining company, and several other companies. Andrew was a pioneer in setting up trusts in the Central Asia. He is a frequent and very well-regarded speaker on complex areas of corporate and personal tax and structuring in international forums.
