The coronavirus has had major implications for capital markets lawyers.

Clifford Chance has acted on FTSE 100 food services company Compass Group's £2 billion COVID-related capital raising — the firm's second landmark capital markets mandate since the beginning of the pandemic.

The firm is advising a syndicate of banks, consisting of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and BofA Securities, on a primary share issuance by Compass Group on what is the largest capital raise by a company listed on the London Stock Exchange in the past 12 months, and also the largest globally since the pandemic began, according to the Clifford Chance announcement.

Compass will use the proceeds of the raising to strengthen its balance sheet and liquidity position and reduce leverage to offset the impact of the pandemic on the business.

The Clifford Chance team was led out of the London office by partner Simon Thomas, who also co-led for the firm last month when it took a role for another hard-hit FTSE 100 events company, Informa, on its £1 billion capital raise — now the second largest raising by a company listed on the London Stock Exchange in the last year, after Compass.

A Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer team, led by corporate partners Mark Austin, David Sonter and Doug Smith, advised Compass.

The equity capital markets deal comes amid a torrent of capital raisings to have taken place in the U.K., with Compass marking the latest events company to have strengthened its balance sheet this way. In April, coronavirus-impacted events company Arena Events undertook a £9.5 million capital raise, on which it was advised by Pinsent Masons.

"The U.K. equity markets are quite supportive of secondary capital raisings and so we've seen a far more active market in the U.K. than we have across Europe so far," said CC partner Thomas. "That's resulted in a good number of listed companies going to shareholders to raise equity since the end of March, which is when the pandemic really started to impact the U.K."

"Those have mostly been done via undocumented placings, but we're starting to see the emergence of rights issues. What I expect will happen is that as companies publish their half year results, there will be a move towards rights issues and documented capital raisings, but at the moment we're in this period when companies don't have their financials available and therefore can't get a prospectus together."

Elsewhere in Europe, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton recently took on a mandate for Luxembourg-based steel producer ArcelorMittal on its $2 billion issue of shares and convertible debt to better hedge the business post-pandemic.

Lawyers in Australia, meanwhile, have also seen an uptick in capital markets activity, as companies down under rush to secure their finances via the stock market. Data supplied by Dealogic showed that $14.9 billion has been raised across 235 separate equity secondary raisings on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2020 so far.

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