Hogan Lovells sets eyes on Ghana's infrastructure prospects
A global law firm, Hogan Lovells, is using its decades of experience advising in Africa to work with local teams to help guide the government and the private sector to craft business deals that will help meet the infrastructure needs of the country.
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With operations in about 50 countries globally, the firm has been operating in Africa for many years.
A partner of the firm and Head of the Africa practice, Mr Andrew Skipper, said in an interview that the firm was now aiming at building on those successes through the creation and nurturing of strong local connections with Ghanaian partners.
"You cannot operate as a global firm without strong local connections. You will need to understand the local market and you cannot pretend, if you are not Ghanaian, to understand the market. That is why I regularly visit Ghana and work closely with local professionals to do that," Mr Skipper told the paper on the sidelines of a roun-dtable discussion on infrastructure in Accra.
The one-day event by the company was on the theme: 'Financing Infrastructure -- Transport, Power and Housing.' It aimed at bringing business leaders together to discuss some of the topical issues affecting the business environment in Ghana and West Africa as a whole.
Interest in Ghana
While here in Ghana, the company intends to pay particular attention to power and infrastructure initiatives, which, co-incidentally, present exciting opportunities for growth to businesses and the economy at large.
"The main prospects in Ghana, for me, are in power and infrastructure - there is a real need for power projects and for the infrastructure to support them, it should be a symbiotic relationship where one sustains the other.
To help encourage increased private sector participation in the power sector, he said the government needed to ensure certainty of returns on the investments to be made, as well as certainty of the terms on which investments would be made.
"If you look at Africa as a whole, there are a number of issues which arise consistently and which need to be dealt with to secure long-term business and investment. These include the 3 C's of currency, corruption and certainty which when addressed can lead to a more confident environment," " he said.
He noted that the majority of the concerns bothering Africa including Ghana were in the ambits of government and expressed the hope that the new administration will help to resolve them.
"If you want to have investments, you have to have some certainty, transparency and fairness of doing business that is down to government and best business practice. Part of that is corruption which does needs to be dealt with and I am sure that the new government has it high on its agenda," he said.
Servicing clients
Currently, Hogan Lovells has an office in South Africa, but it serves its Africa clients generally from a range of hubs including London, Johannesburg, Dubai, Paris, Washington and Beijing.
