A capital structure is a set of promises: to lenders, to shareholders, to regulators. Orion designs those promises so that they can be kept — balancing cost against flexibility, today’s funding against tomorrow’s, and conventional instruments against Islamic and alternative ones where they serve the client better.
Financing and capital markets
The right money, on the right terms, from the right investors.
Orion advises corporates, financial institutions and sovereigns on their financing strategy: how much capital they need, in what form, from which market and at what cost. We diversify funding away from a single lender, design fixed-income and equity issues for public and private markets, and structure each transaction so that it survives the scrutiny of investors, rating agencies and regulators.
In the early 2000s Orion advised several Lebanese banks on raising capital and on issuing preferred shares and fixed-income securities — including a preferred share whose return was linked to the bank’s performance. The firm has organised initial and secondary public offerings for emerging-market companies.
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Where traditional bank finance is unavailable, Orion turns to alternatives that give borrowers more flexibility: asset-backed securities and securitisation, factoring and receivables finance, private placements with targeted investors, and financing triangulation — combining cross-border funding, swaps against equity and repayment through a third party. In Jordan, the factoring of municipal receivables in Jordanian dinars lowered a solar consortium’s weighted average cost of capital by 500 basis points.
Islamic finance and sukuk
Sharia-compliant structures engineered to the same standard as conventional ones.
Dr. Ghassan Chammas advised the Banque du Liban on Islamic financial affairs and has advised the boards of several Islamic banks on product innovation, corporate governance and risk management. Orion engineers Sharia-compliant products and financing for banks, corporates and funds — from trade-based instruments such as murabaha and ijara to participation structures and sukuk.
Orion has also written on Islamic financing vehicles for a dedicated industrial fund in Lebanon.
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Orion’s Sharia work extends to measurement: the Orion Scoring & Rating platform includes a Sharia-compliance module that scores companies against Islamic screening criteria, and Dr. Chammas’s research on concentration and specialisation measures applies to the construction of Islamic investment portfolios. For issuers, the firm prepares the documentation, the Sharia governance framework and the investor case that a first sukuk requires.
Project finance and energy
Financing structures for infrastructure, industry and the energy transition.
The partners develop financing structures for public and private projects. Recent work has concentrated on renewable energy: a financing fund for solar energy in commercial and industrial premises, a village-scale solar programme in which households pay only for the kilowatt-hours they consume, and the financial structure of a national energy fund for Lebanese industry, prepared for a nationwide government project.
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Each structure separates the asset from the sponsor in a special-purpose vehicle, matches tenor to the life of the plant, and draws on several pools of capital — long-term investors, diaspora capital, development-finance institutions and trade-finance funds — so that no single lender carries the project. Orion’s supply-side survey of Lebanese solar providers and its commercial and industrial solar assessment underpin these designs.
M&A, private equity and venture capital
From the first valuation to the signing.
Through its partners Orion has advised on company disposals to private and institutional investors, on acquisitions and leveraged buy-outs, and on the entry of private equity funds into family companies. It has advised funds and companies on specific transactions and channelled investment opportunities to MENA-based private equity and venture capital funds.
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Every mandate rests on an independent valuation, the document that finally lets owners and investors agree on a price. Orion also designs investment vehicles — private equity and working-capital funds, recapitalisation funds and their general-partner structures — and prepares business models and investor presentations for start-ups seeking their first institutional money.
Licensing of financial institutions
Business models that regulators approve.
Orion writes business models and feasibility studies and obtains operating licences for financial institutions in different jurisdictions — banks, investment banks, brokerage and finance companies — including the economic analysis, peer benchmarking and organisational design that regulators require.
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Recent work includes the feasibility study and establishment memorandum for a new investment bank, with an analysis of the host economy, a peer review of private banks and an organisational design based on the McKinsey 7-S model, and a regulatory pathway for a licensed payments platform.