Project Participants and Structures

Abstract Project financing is characterized by financial and legal advisers assisting their clients to allocate rights and obligations between the project participants, spreading risks and responsibilities to those best suited to bear them, to create a bankable project. In so doing, complex structures evolve. Thus, an understanding of the objectives and goals of the key project participants is absolutely critical to the successful negotiation of a project financing. This chapter provides an accessible and general overview of project financing. The first part examines the key project participants by addressing the following simple questions: (i) who are they, (ii) what are their roles, and (iii) to a lesser extent, what are their key motivations? The second part gives an overview of typical structures employed for a project, in terms of both the ownership structure employed by the sponsors of a project and also the underlying structure of the project as a whole.