As part of ongoing plans to develop its core practice groups, Mayer Brown announced it has recruited Trevor Wood and Mayank Gupta as partners to its Banking & Finance team in London.

Wood is a finance lawyer whose practice covers syndicated and bilateral lending, leveraged finance and structured finance. He acts for senior and mezzanine finance providers and borrowers, and has considerable expertise advising on transactions with an emerging market element to them. In addition, Wood has advised on restructurings in the emerging markets, and across Europe and Asia.

Wood will join Mayer Brown from Berwin Leighton Paisner’s finance & restructuring practice, where he was a partner. Earlier in his career he worked at Jones Day and Clifford Chance, where he spent three-and-a-half years in Hong Kong and advised on a range of finance and restructuring transactions across the South East Asia region. Trevor is also admitted as a solicitor in England and Wales and in Hong Kong SAR.

Gupta has extensive experience advising financial institutions and multinational companies on a variety of financing transactions, including leverage finance, corporate finance and sovereign lending. His practice has an emerging markets focus and he formerly advised the Emerging Markets team at Deutsche Bank on a variety of transactions in the Middle East, Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa. Gupta also worked in Hong Kong for two years at his most recent firm, White & Case, where he handled a number of market leading transactions, including the largest-ever bond issuance in Bangladesh at that time. Earlier in his career he worked in Sydney for Australian law firm, Gadens Lawyers.

Dominic Griffiths, head of Mayer Brown’s Banking & Finance group in London, said, “The emerging markets are a key focus for this firm. Trevor and Mayank coming in as a team in this area substantially enhances our capability. The hires were made as a direct response to client demand. I expect them both to work closely with our London capital markets, projects and derivatives lawyers specializing in emerging markets work as well as our corporate lawyers, particularly Rob Hamill and Greg Stonefield, who are active on Africa based mandates. They also bring in further leveraged lending and restructuring skills.”

These lateral hires are the latest in a line of specialist hires into the Banking & Finance team to be announced by the firm in recent months following the appointments of securitization partners Richard Todd and David O’Connor.