Jack LandryManaging Director, Project FinanceThe practice.
Kadenwood's project finance practice is led by Jack Landry, Managing Director, who structures and closes project finance in infrastructure and energy, with a quantitative focus on capital structure, risk allocation, and the underlying model. The work covers long-dated financings that must survive construction and a multi-decade operating life, which is a different discipline from corporate lending and is treated as one.
The coverage runs to concession structuring, public-private partnership procurement, and project financings across transport, utilities, and social infrastructure, including advisory delivered alongside government and multilateral programs. On the capital side the practice runs syndication with institutional lenders and development finance partners, and works with labelled sustainable instruments where the asset supports them.
The instruments are limited-recourse structures, concessions and public-private arrangements. What unites them is the question they answer for a sponsor: how to finance an asset on the strength of its own economics.
What does limited recourse actually buy a sponsor?
Separation. The asset sits in its own project company, the debt is raised by that company, and the lenders' claim runs to the project's cash flows and contracts rather than to the sponsor's balance sheet. A sponsor can finance an asset larger than its own credit would support, and a problem at the project does not automatically become a problem for everything else the sponsor owns.
The price of that separation is structure. Because the lenders cannot look to the sponsor, they look harder at everything else: the construction contract and who bears completion risk, the revenue contract or concession and who bears demand risk, the operating arrangements, the reserve accounts, and the covenants that govern what the project company may do with its cash. Project finance documentation is long because it is doing the work a guarantee would otherwise do.
For the sponsor weighing the route, the decision is therefore not recourse versus non-recourse in the abstract. It is whether the asset's contracted cash flows are strong and long enough to carry a structure that substitutes contracts for the corporate guarantee, and whether the sponsor is prepared to operate inside that structure for the life of the debt.
What do project finance lenders test?
The model, before anything else, because the model is where the whole transaction lives. Project lenders size and covenant debt off coverage of the project's cash flows across construction and the operating life, under downside cases for the variables that matter: construction cost and delay, availability or demand, operating cost, and the terms of the revenue contract. The coverage disciplines are the same family a corporate borrower meets, applied over a far longer horizon.
Then the risk allocation. A project financing is a map of who bears which risk, drawn in the contracts: completion risk to the contractor, demand or availability risk as the concession allocates it, operating risk to the operator, residual risks to the sponsor or the lenders as negotiated. Lenders test whether each risk sits with a party that can actually carry it, and mispriced allocation, not mispriced debt, is where these structures fail.
Then the counterparties. A multi-decade financing is a claim on the reliability of every party in the structure: the contractor, the operator, the offtaker or granting authority, and the lenders themselves. This is why syndication and lender selection are a core workstream rather than an afterthought, and why development finance participation can anchor structures that purely private syndicates would not carry alone.