How Adebayo Ogunlesi Acquired Gatwick Airport For £1.455 Billion

*His Early Life In Lagos

+His Many Business Pies

Adebayo Ogunlesi is a leading executive at Credit Suisse First Boston Corporation (CSFB), an arm of the Zurich-based global investment bank with offices on six continents. In February of 2002 he was named head of CSFB's investment banking group. The rise of this Harvard-educated lawyer prompted Time magazine to name him to its "People to Watch in International Business" list a few weeks later, and Ogunlesi was also ranked by Fortune magazine as the seventh most powerful black executive in the United States.

In a lengthy New York magazine feature titled "The New Color of Money," writer Landon Thomas Jr. discussed the new, more multicultural atmosphere in the world of international finance at the start of the twenty-first century. Thomas wrote, "Call it the new face of Wall Street. More than ever now, a wave of Indians, Lebanese, Africans, and others from the farthest reaches of the globe are stepping into positions of the highest power at firms all across the Street. For years, these immigrant bankers have been the stars of their trading desks, raking in millions for themselves and their firms. For the first time, they are running the most profitable divisions of the Wall Street banks."

Ogunlesi's latest deal is the much talked about acquisition of the London Gatwick Airport. The Gatwick deal is a £1.455 billion agreement with BAA Airports Limited. GIP will be investing through Ivy Bidco Limited, a limited liability company registered in England, established for the purpose of making the acquisition. Bidco will pay cash consideration of £1,455 million for the entire share capital of Gatwick Airport Limited on a cash-free, debt-free basis. Ogunlesi says the acquisition of Gatwick is a landmark deal for GIP and adds another quality asset to his firm's rapidly expanding portfolio.

According to him, "we see significant scope to apply both our strong operational focus and our knowledge of the airports sector to make Gatwick an airport of choice." He began stacking up his big deals profile when he joined the top-shelf New York law firm, Cravath, Swain & Moore. It was at the law firm that he jumped at the chance to advise First Boston (which later acquired Credit Suisse in 1997 to form Credit Suisse First Boston or CSFB) on a hugely lucrative Nigerian gas project. The success of that deal landed him his first big pay move to First Boston. For First Boston, he worked on project finance, brokering deals in which lenders finance assets like oil refineries and mines and are repaid with revenues generated by those enterprises. Based in New York City and travelling to emerging markets, he built CSFB's project-finance business into the world's best, in part by encouraging corporations and governments to tap public debt markets in addition to commercial lenders. 

Clerked at Supreme Court

Ogunlesi was born in 1953 in Nigeria. He travelled to England to earn an honors degree from Oxford University, then entered a joint law-business degree program at Harvard University in the late 1970s. At the law school, he was one of just three non-Americans in his class. "There only was a guy from Saudi Arabia, a guy from Iran and me," he joked with the New York Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin. "I assume Harvard thought that all of us would go back to our countries, become rich, and endow chairs. I hope the Iranian and Saudi did, because I never endowed a chair."

Before he graduated magna cum laude in 1979, Ogunlesi served as editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review at a historic moment when he, along with W. Randy Eaddy, were the first two blacks ever to become Review editors at the top-ranked law school. Following standard practice for such Ivy League law school students and recent graduates, Ogunlesi then clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. At the time, Ogunlesi was the first non-American clerk at the High Court. According to the New York Times report by Sorkin, Justice Marshall called him "Ooo-by-do-bee," because he often stumbled over Ogunlesi's first name.

After earning his law degree and a master's degree in business administration, Ogunlesi entered private practice with the firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore in New York City. In 1983, when he had been there less than a year, he received a phone call from a friend back in Nigeria who was working at the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. The friend needed a financial adviser for a planned natural gas venture, and asked Ogunlesi for help. Credit Suisse First Boston Corporation (CSFB) was involved in the financing and, as Ogunlesi recalled to Sorkin, "somehow the guys at First Boston found out that this fellow was a friend of mine." First Boston then asked the law firm if they could grant Ogunlesi leave for three months to help win the account.

Ogunlesi liked the world of international finance so much that he stayed on board at CSFB. "Of course, six months after I got hired here, there was a coup in Nigeria, the government got tossed out and my friend almost went to jail," he recalled in the interview with Sorkin. Ogunlesi's own career path was smoother: he rose through the company's management ranks, eventually heading CSFB's project finance group. When that group merged with the power-finance group, he remained in charge. Two other mergers, with CSFB's oil and gas group and chemicals group, made the unit so large that it was--once again in reference to Ogunlesi's given name--nicknamed the "Bayo-sphere," according to Sorkin.

Ogunlesi was made a managing director at CSFB in 1993. His division, now called the global energy group, obtained financing for large-scale energy projects around the globe. For Texaco and Mission Energy, for example, Ogunlesi headed a team that raised $400 million for a Tri Energy project in Thailand. His division also came up with $100 million in financing for the Androscoggin Power Project in aine, and helped a British firm break ground in China on the Mezhiou Wan power project.

Promoted to Key Post

With the onset of the bear market on Wall Street in mid-2000, Ogunlesi was one of an entire class of finance industry executives vulnerable to layoffs or even outright termination. Along with two other prominent Wall Street firms, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, CSFB began eliminating some longtime senior managers, while retaining many of the rising foreign-born stars like Ogunlesi. In February of 2002, he was made head of global investment banking at the firm, one of its most influential divisions, with assets of $2.8 billion. First Boston CEO John J. Mack, in a press release issued by the firm on news of Ogunlesi's advancement, called him "a banker of powerful intellect, integrity and innovation."

Ogunlesi was also given a seat on the CSFB board with his promotion, replacing Tony James, who became chair of global investment banking and private equity. Thomas, in the New York magazine article, compared Ogunlesi with his predecessor, asserting that, "as impressive as Ogunlesi is the identity of the man he replaced ... is what gave his appointment a more profound resonance." Thomas sketched James's elite New England background and place in the upper echelons of New York society, and characterized Ogunlesi as an executive "known more for his money-spinning innovations in the bank's project-finance division than for his fly-fishing skills." Thomas also mentioned Ogunlesi along with Vikram Pandit, the Bombay-born co-head of institutional securities at Morgan Stanley, and Arshad Zakaria, Merrill Lynch's co-head of global markets and investment banking, also a native of Bombay. The New York article noted that this combined trio had 25,000 bankers reporting to them, giving them authority of an unprecedented scope.

Wall Street Belt-Tightening

Nonetheless, Ogunlesi faced some daunting tasks in his first year on the job, not the least of which was to turn around CSFB's global investment banking division, which had posted its first unprofitable quarter in four years. He announced a reorganization plan, telling several dozen CSFB executives that the company's departments were overstaffed, and that changes would be forthcoming. "We're going to break a lot of glass," the New York Times's Sorkin quoted him as saying. Some top executives balked at the plan and resigned, but the job-cutting was part of a wave of downsizing at many of Wall Street's top firms at the time. A moribund economy and the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon had spurred immense losses in the securities and banking sector. "Ogunlesi scolded bankers during the meeting for not paying enough attention to turning a profit, and encouraged employees to take taxis instead of limousines," reported Sorkin.

True to his word, a round of cutbacks delivered pink slips to the desks of 300 bankers in March of 2002. Ogunlesi also decided, with the support of CSFB's board of directors, to merge the company's telecommunications and media groups. A few weeks later, in early April, more than four dozen managing directors were let go.

Ogunlesi has been hailed as one of Wall Street's most influential new names and as one of its most impressive cost-cutters in recent memory. He told Sorkin in the New York Times, "I told you, I never wanted to be an investment banker."

We also gathered that, Bayo was once the chairperson of the Lagos-based Africa Finance Corporation (promoted by the CBN under Prof.Soludo, former governor of Cental Bank Nigeria), a member of Nigeria's honorary Investment Advisory Council under  Ex-President Obasanjo's government, and for several years has been an informal advisor to the Nigerian government, starting from former President-Obasanjo in 1999.

He was a staff member of U.S. Court of Appeals, Washington, D.C.; clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; Cravath, Swaine & Moore, New York City, attorney 1983; joined Credit Suisse First Boston, Inc.1983, managing director, 1993, headed global energy group, 1993-2002, head of global investment banking, 2002, board of directors, 2003

Education: Bachelor's Degree University Of Lagos Nigeria, MBA IESE Business School-Barcelona, Oxford University, Honors degree; Harvard University, M.B.A., J.D., 1979.

February 24, 2010