Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP announced that it has represented the underwriters in the largest corporate debt offering on record – Verizon Communication’s $49 billion bond sale to fund the company’s purchase of Vodafone Group PLC’s interest in Verizon Wireless.
The immense offering by Verizon is being issued eight separate tranches – from 3 and 5-year floating notes to 3, 5, 7, 10, 20 and 30-year fixed rate notes. The underwriters were led by Barclays Capital; J.P. Morgan Securities; Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.
Verizon’s sale is the biggest single corporate debt issuance by a wide margin, dwarfing Apple’s $17 billion bond sale this past spring. Prior to that, the largest offering was the 2009 sale of $16.5 billion of bonds by Roche Holdings.
Milbank’s deal team was led by Global Securities partners Robert W. Mullen, Jr. and Paul Denaro. Milbank has been underwriter counsel to other major debt transactions for Verizon.
Also working on the latest transaction were London-based Global Securities partner Timothy Peterson and New York-based Tax partner Andrew Walker, along with New York-based Global Securities associates Michael Lee, Megha Shah and John Ablan and Tax associate Lysondra Ludwig.
“We are extremely pleased to be advising a world-class group of institutions in bringing this historic offering to market,” Mr. Mullen said. “The unprecedented size of the issue demonstrates the enormous liquidity in the market. We anticipate more large M&A transactions and large corporate debt issuance in the months ahead.”
Mr. Denaro added, “We are proud to have such an active role in this milestone offering on behalf of such a distinguished underwriter group. Our capital markets team has had a great year as major companies continue to take advantage of favorable conditions for funding acquisitions, operations and redeeming outstanding debt. We are pleased to be partnering with a deep roster of leading financial institution clients in structuring these varied deals, and look forward to a strong conclusion of the year.”
