Biography: Capital Markets

Dr Gbolahan Elias is the versatile presiding partner of G Elias & Co (Solicitors and Advocates), one of Nigeria's leading business law firms. He is both a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (Nigeria's UK Queen's Counsel equivalent) and one of Nigeria's foremost corporate finance transactions lawyers.

He has advised on many large public offerings of securities. Among these are the largest bond offering in Nigerian history (AMCON; US$20 billion) and the largest equity offering ever in Nigeria, (Ecobank Transnational Inc's US$2.5 billion offer).

He has also advised on complex structured debt offerings (such as a first-in-Africa FMBN residential mortgages master trust securitisation (US$800million), up to US$6billion of corporate bond offerings and up to US$600million in state bond offerings.

He has also counselled on GDR placements and setting up GDR programmes and placements, a number of sector-first IPOs (including the first for 'E&P' oil, shipping and telecommunications companies) and pioneering offerings of units in managed funds (including the first-ever fund focused on the banking sector, a closed-end unit trust and the first Islamic unit trust).

He was educated at Magdalen and Merton Colleges, Oxford, graduating DPhil MA BCL (Oxon) with First Class Honours. He was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1981 and the New York Bar in 1990. He was an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York from late 1989 to mid-1993.

Dr Elias has published Explaining Constructive Trusts (Oxford University Press) and more than a dozen papers on topical aspects in Nigerian business law. He has also served on committees to reform the law relating to pensions, trusts, oil-and-gas and arbitration.

Biography: Commercial Litigation

Dr Gbolahan Elias is the presiding partner of G Elias & Co (Solicitors and Advocates). He practices in both trial and appellate courts and before administrative and arbitral tribunals. His most important and complex recent work has been in four areas: arbitration; product liability; capital markets; and mergers and acquisitions.

Among other work, he has been advising: on enforcing an award for a shipping company for US$210mm, and on an arbitration between a telephony operator and its advertising agency; a leading manufacturer in the most extensive series of product liability cases ever commenced in Nigeria, currently before both trial and appellate courts; one of the nation's oldest banks and several of its directors in a series of proceedings filed by the securities regulator alleging multiple violations of corporate and securities laws; an investment bank against a commercial bank on issues involving insolvency law and alleged illegal 'financial assistance' in buying shares; and the privatisation agency in an attempt by labour unions to stop the privatisation of the government-controlled telephone monopoly, and a prospective purchaser of shares in an old bank to stop the sale of a controlling interest in it to another purchaser.

He was educated at Magdalen and Merton colleges, Oxford, graduating DPhil MA BCL (Oxon) with first class honours. He was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1981 and the New York Bar in 1991. He was at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York from late 1989 to mid-1993. He is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.