Witold Balaban

Practice Areas

Witold Balaban is recognized by leading global financial institution clients for his knowledge of the equity markets and the various financial products developed over the last couple of decades to enable corporate clients to restructure their balance sheets and to finance, monetize, and/or hedge large concentrated equity positions. Mr. Balaban’s market knowledge and his technical product experience makes him the go-to person for structuring complex and first-of-its-kind equity-linked transactions spanning a number of jurisdictions.

Mr. Balaban advises clients on financing strategies relating to concentrated equity positions and on balance sheet restructuring transactions, including:

• Convertible and exchangeable bond offerings (both optional and mandatory, including trust-issued mandatory exchangeables) and related call spread overlays

• Convertible bond exchanges and related call spread unwinds

• Structured margin loans

• Various other equity-based financing, hedging, and monetization transactions, such as funded collars, variable prepaid forwards, covered calls, and combinations of the foregoing

• Fixed and variable share forward sales and related equity offerings, including registered and Rule 144 exempt block sales and at-the-market (ATM) offerings

• Structured issuer share repurchase transactions

Mr. Balaban has held a number of leadership roles at the firm, including as former Global Co-Chair of Latham & Watkins’ Financial Institutions Industry Group. He is also the former Global Co-Chair of the firm’s Capital Markets Practice. In this role, Mr. Balaban focused on building and marketing Latham’s unique global capital markets offering that provides the firm’s global financial institution clients with integrated, top-tier financial regulatory coverage spanning the US, the UK, the EU, and Asia.