Anthony V. Raftopol
Leaders in Law endorses Anthony Raftopol as our exclusively recommended Joint Ventures Law expert in The Netherlands. If you wish to get in touch with Anthony please use the contact information provided above.
As Managing Partner in the Ternir Group, Anthony Raftopol is an Amsterdam-based, United States-trained international lawyer focusing for almost 25 years on cross-border transactions for the benefit of corporate and institutional investors into a wide variety of post-conflict/post-transitional emerging markets in the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
His clients are engaged in a wide variety of fields, including transportation, infrastructure, construction, power generation, healthcare, applied sciences, oil & gas, agriculture, commercial real estate, leisure properties, consumer products, as well as banking and finance.
Mr. Raftopol is also Senior Legal Counsel and/or a member of the Board of Directors of several private equity funds located in the United States focusing on the healthcare sector, and is actively involved in several transactions that form the center of the U.S. government and private-sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is also on the Board of Directors of several start-up and pre-IPO medical device and med-tech companies based in the United States.
Mr. Raftopol’s international contacts are strongest in the Middle East and the Western Balkans, as well as the banking, finance and legal industries located in the US, Europe, the Gulf States, the PRC, Hong Kong and several “off-shore” jurisdictions. As such, Mr. Raftopol maintains close contacts and formal relationships with numerous law and investment banking firms located in those markets.
Mr. Raftopol has been a member of the Bar of the State of New York (USA) since 1995, and is also a member of the Bar of Bucharest, Romania (status currently inactive). He is a graduate of Northwestern University in Chicago, USA as well as the Boston University School of Law.
In addition to his native English and Romanian, Mr. Raftopol also speaks and/or works in several other European languages.
Firm Description:
We are a network of lawyers, accountants and strategic market experts whose value proposition is to forge well-managed, locally-focused and cost-effective market-entry and operations solutions on behalf of clients doing business in one or more of the countries of EASTERN EUROPE AND THE MENA (MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA) region. Our core strength is to combine internationally-trained and -experienced teams coupled with local talent to forge in-country networks, establish a corporate and operational presence, as well as assist our clients to navigate the vagaries of local bureaucracies and their related decision-making ecosystems. To that end, we are focused on making sure that our clients have the support required to prosper within the context of legal, business and cultural environments that are often quite different from those at home.
Our clients are mostly Far-East Asian-, US- and EU-based businesses involved in a variety of sectors, including commercial real estate, the hospitality sector, oil & gas, healthcare, agriculture, transportation & logistics, banking & finance, commodities, distribution, pharma and private equity investing.
Although our services may be as varied as the backgrounds of the teams we have in place in any particular jurisdiction, our core focus involves the following:
- Local market corporate establishment and compliance upkeep;
- In-country team building and market positioning vis-à-vis local businesses and government (including office set-up, hiring and management of personnel, payroll, visas as well as all forms of licensing and permitting);
- Strategic due diligence with respect to prospective local partners and in-country assets/businesses through in-house professionals and alliances with local firms;
- Cross-border transaction advice with an emphasis on local laws and procedures;
- Joint-venture structures and arrangements;
- Local business marketing and strategic advice to position them for out-of-country strategic alliances, buy-outs, international lending and private equity financing.
Although our clients also include large, multinational companies, we do, in fact, seek to adapt our services to the needs of medium-sized, family-owned and privately-held companies that require qualified teams in place in Eastern Europe and the MENA region without the expense associated with large, cost-heavy consulting practices. We do this by forging alliances with local professionals on a project-by-project basis, avoiding the heavy fees associated with the “New York/London-jet-set” crowd, avoiding centralised or permanent office locations, while relying on both formal and informal relationships in a wide variety of circumstances to get the job done. We also avoid needless costs (from “vanity travel” to entrenched partner pay-outs) to keep our fees to a reasonable level, thus encouraging our clients to outsource as much of the early-stage operational oversight as possible. In this light, the more we take on, the less our clients will need to put up with while forging a strategy for market entry and on-going success.
Our professionals are well-versed and -embedded in and wide variety of locations, and are trained to cover projects throughout the Balkans, the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the Central Asian Republics, the Republic of Turkey, the Arab Gulf States, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, the Levant, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa, Mongolia and the People’s Republic of China.
