William Candelaria

William Candelaria is a partner in the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. His practice focuses on corporate transactions, private equity and capital markets. Mr. Candelaria has extensive experience in SEC-registered securities offerings, private placements, asset and stock acquisitions, structured and leveraged financings, debt restructurings, and cross-border joint ventures. He has advised foreign private issuers on internal corporate investigations and SEC investigations, delisting of publicly traded securities from U.S. securities exchanges and deregistration under the Exchange Act. Chambers USA: America's Leading Lawyers for Business ranked Mr. Candelaria among the top Latin American Investment lawyers in the United States. According to Chambers USA, "clients strongly recommend Mr. Candelaria for his solid credentials in private equity work and capital markets." Mr. Candelaria recently spoke on “M&A in Mexico: Tender Offer Regulations, PIPES and Considerations for U.S. Investors” at the Practicing Law Institute. He recently presided over the Council on Foreign Relations' roundtable discussion "Mexico 2009: Economic, Political and Security Challenges." He has spoken on the financing of refineries and other downstream infrastructure in Mexico at the Institute of the Americas' oil and gas conference in Mexico City, and has participated in roundtable discussions at the University of Miami on Mexico's energy sector. Mr. Candelaria has moderated discussions and spoken on trends in emerging markets securitization and capital markets at the American Bar Association's International Section meeting in Miami, the South African Securitization & Capital Markets Conference in Cape Town, and at the University of the West Indies Caribbean Law Workshop in Grand Cayman. He has taught continuing legal education courses on delisting from U.S. markets and SEC deregistration and on the requirements for foreign issuer access to U.S. capital markets. Before the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Mr. Candelaria spoke at the European Law Center at Harvard Law School on the potential beneficial effect of U.S. securities disclosure requirements on the transparency of foreign corporations. Since 2006, Mr. Candelaria has served on the faculty of the Practising Law Institute in New York and has spoken annually at the PLI's initial public offerings seminar on the negotiation of underwriting agreements and IPO liability considerations for underwriters. In 2005, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed Mr. Candelaria to serve on the Board of Directors of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, where he currently serves on the Executive Committee, as Chairman of the Audit Committee and as a member of the Governance Committee. He has served on the Board of the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund and is currently on the Advisory Council of The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School. From 1995 to 1996, Mr. Candelaria served as a law clerk to Judge Harry Pregerson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles. He is admitted to practice in New York and California. Mr. Candelaria received his Juris Doctor cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review. His Law Review publication, "Liberalismo Contra Democracia: Recent Judicial Reform in Mexico,” examined Mexico's 1994 judicial reform and its potential effects on Mexican democratic transformation. Mr. Candelaria earned his A.B. in International Relations and A.M. in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. His graduate thesis, “Development, Finance and Foreigners: The Early History of Mexico’s Banks (1821-1910),” examined the participation of U.S. and European capital in the formation of Mexico's commercial banking system. Mr. Candelaria completed coursework at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and interned at the legal department of the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público in Mexico City. Mr. Candelaria was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a native English speaker and is fluent in Spanish.