Biography: Mergers and Acquisitions

Johan read for his LLM at the London School of Economics, before joining a Johannesburg law firm in 1980. He practised as a director of that firm until he co-founded Brink Cohen Le Roux in 1993.

Johan represents major listed companies in takeovers, mergers, acquisitions and group reorganisations and acts for multinationals in structuring their South African operations and represents them on local boards of directors.

He advises on commercial paper issues, syndicated loans, securitisations, derivatives and participants in the securities lending industry. He has extensive experience in advising arrangers, lead managers and issuers in connection with corporate domestic medium-term note programmes, as well as listed bond issues by several corporates, parastatals, water utilities, government controlled companies and metropolitan municipalities.

Johan is an extraordinary professor of mercantile law at the University of South Africa and a guest lecturer at the MBA graduate programme of the Wits Business School, as well as the University of Johannesburg. He also lectures at international and South African seminars on a broad range of topics including foreign investment, future development of SA corporate law, repurchase agreements, securities lending, corporate funding and commercial paper issues, banking, share buybacks, hostile takeovers and mergers and company law reform. He is a former chair of the board of directors of Interlaw, an international association of law firms in over 60 countries and 120 business centres worldwide. He also serves on the ad hoc committee on corporate law of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) and was recently appointed to the FRSC (Financial Reporting Standards Council), a statutory body created in terms of the new Companies Act, 2008.

He has been listed as one of South Africa's top lawyers in both the banking & finance and corporate/mergers and acquisitions categories by Chambers Global: The World's Leading Lawyers, as well as the mergers & acquisitions and competition law handbooks of Practical Law Company. He has also been nominated as a leading lawyer in The International Who's Who of Banking Lawyers, The International Who's Who of Mergers & Acquisition Lawyers and the banking & project finance, capital markets and mergers & acquisitions practice areas in IFLR1000 for a number of years.

Johan speaks English and Afrikaans.