Biography: Corporate Governance

Benita has substantial experience in securities transactions, including cross-border listings and share offerings by overseas corporations and PRC state-owned enterprises, corporate finance transactions, mergers and acquisitions and joint ventures. She also advises on banking and international debt securities transactions.

Benita read law at Oxford University and worked with another major city law firm in London for six years before joining Slaughter and May. She is qualified in Hong Kong and English law, and speaks fluent English, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Benita is a member of the takeovers and mergers panel, the takeovers appeal committee of the SFC in Hong Kong and a member of the standing committee on company law reform of the HKSAR Government.

Benita has a wealth of experience in bringing PRC corporates to market and has advised on a number of groundbreaking capital markets transactions, including advising: Prudential plc on its dual primary listing in Hong Kong by way of introduction and in relation to its secondary listing in Singapore, being the first London/New York/Hong Kong/Singapore listed company; the sponsors/underwriters on the listings of China Pacific Insurance, Alibaba.com, Bank of Communications Company Limited, Fosun International, and the dual/triple listings and global offerings of Sinopec, China Unicom, Aluminum Corporation of China (Chalco) and China Telecom (raising between US$450 million and US$5.6 billion); the issuers on the listings of Metallurgical Corporation of China, Dongfeng Motor Group Company, China National Building Material Company, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and MTR Corporation (Hong Kong's first and to date only privatisation) (raising between US$265 million and US$3.6 billion); China Power International Development on its issues of RMB-denominated convertible bonds and RMB denominated bonds, China Power New Energy Development on its issue of RMB-denominated guaranteed bonds and Morgan Stanley on the top-up placing and convertible debt issue by Zhongyu Gas and on the partial top-up placing and convertible bond issue by China Infrastructure Machinery (raising between US$76 million and US$302 million); secondary placings of shares in listed companies, including China National Building Material Company, China Yurun Food Group, China Everbright, CST Mining Group, Agile Property Holdings, Shanghai Forte Land, Century Sunshine Ecological Technology and PetroChina (raising between US$71 million and US$2.7 billion).

Benita also has significant experience of a range of acquisitions, disposals and corporate transactions, including advising Alibaba.com on its acquisition of a majority interest in China Civilink, SMIC on the strategic investments by CIC and Datang, Hony Capital on its investment in a Madagascan iron ore mining project, China Power International Development on its acquisition of interests in Wu Ling Power and Shanghai Electric Power Company, CICC on the restructuring of the PRC telecommunications industry, China CITIC Group on the strategic investments in China CITIC Bank and China International Financial Holdings by BBVA, Profit Eagle Limited on its voluntary takeover, and the delisting, of Superdata Software Holdings Limited from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and a consortium of strategic investors on a pre-IPO investment in one of the largest PRC state-owned national commercial banks.

Other Practice Areas

Benita Yu also features in the following practice areas:

• Capital Markets