Ismail Buffins

Ismail received his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where he served as Outreach Coordinator for the Black Law Students Association. Prior to law school, he received his M.Div., magna cum laude, in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard University, where he served as a representative on both the Harvard Graduate Council and the Harvard Divinity School Student Association. Ismail received his B.A. in Sociology, magna cum laude, from Purchase College, SUNY, where he was a founding member of the men’s swim team and taught yoga.

Ismail has been a member of teams representing various parties in a number of in-court restructurings and other matters, including:

Debtor/Company-Side Experience:

• Florida Food Products, LLC, a portfolio company of Ardian and MidOcean Partners and the largest private equity owned natural ingredient supplier in the world, in connection with $92 million of new first lien debt financing and a refinancing of more than $750 million of debt to extend maturities with support of 100% of existing lenders.
• Valves and Controls US Inc., a non-operational subsidiary of the Weir Group PLC and former manufacturer of industrial valve products, in connection with its chapter 11 case involving significant asbestos liabilities.
• Alacrity Solutions, a leader in insurance claims management services, in connection with an out-of-court financial restructuring that provided $175 million in new capital and eliminated approximately $1 billion of debt.
• Terraform Labs Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-based software developer in its chapter 11 cases, involving billions of dollars in claims asserted by the SEC. Terraform Labs developed and supported (i) software used to create and run the Terra blockchain network, a unique decentralized digital ledger of peer-to-peer transactions, and (ii) a suite of tools, protocols, and applications that operate on the Terra blockchain.
• AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc., the largest movie exhibition company in the United States and globally, in its successful out-of-court restructuring which included various capital raising efforts that yielded over $1.5 billion of cash and other liquidity improvements and the reduction of AMC’s debt load by more than $550 million.

Creditor/Acquiror/Other Experience:

• An ad hoc group of term loan lenders (including KKR, Guggenheim and Caspian) in connection with the chapter 11 cases of Accuride Corporation (“Accuride”), formerly a portfolio company of Crestview Partners. Accuride is a leading designer, manufacturer and supplier of steel and aluminum wheels for the commercial vehicle industry. Accuride’s restructuring resulted in the ad hoc group taking a controlling stake in the business through a chapter 11 plan of reorganization.
• An ad hoc group of first lien lenders in connection with the out-of-court cross-border restructuring of Covis Pharma, a multinational specialty pharmaceutical company headquartered in Switzerland.