Richard Tinsley is President of International Advisory & Finance, a Project-Finance boutique, headquartered in Sydney, Australia. His career includes 29 business cards from such fields as quantity surveying in the construction industry, to economics and engineering in the resources sector, project analyst and negotiator in the automobile industry, to professional independent director, chief financial officer, and managing director of publicly-listed companies. Australia is the fifth country in which he has lived permanently.
All this culminated in a 25-year career in Project Financing in each sector of the business – commercial bank (United States and Australia), merchant bank (London), investment bank/Wall St (Sydney office), and now international Project-Finance advisor. He usually is at the treasurer’s/government’s side negotiating against/with the bankers and institutions. An author on many aspects of minerals economics and Project-Finance, he first expounded the risk system of this book to a Vancouver conference in 1982. Since then he has been tracking the application of this risk system and has an almost perfect record. The deals he has declined go wrong! Although some of the deals approved have stumbled, the tight structure inherent in Project Finance has enabled the recovery of the workouts.
Because of his extensive knowledge of documentation, he is often referred to by his colleagues as a ‘bush lawyer’, content to draft just about anything including acts of parliament for the benefit of his project. A knowledge of the complete structure has also proved invaluable in negotiations as well as in making sense of the myriad inputs to the Project-Finance process. The lawyers he has worked with know that there is no such phrase as ‘Let’s leave it to the lawyers.’ One Thank You he truly appreciates after a two-week negotiating session against one of Australia’s foremost Project-Finance solicitors was ‘You never once used ‘Trust me’ in these negotiations.’
Trained as an engineer and economist and with a background in the construction industry, he nevertheless admits to having to retrain his engineering attitude to analysis. This risk system was the catalyst since it is the trade-offs that count, not so much the precision of the spreadsheet. The deal must have strong incentives for both sides to make it work. In this respect too, he realised early that it is people who do deals, not spreadsheets. However, a good knowledge of spreadsheet mathematics and a better feel after some 50,000 or so spreadsheet runs by now, mean that the solution set that will work in a Project Finance can be identified much more quickly by use of this systematic approach to risk and structure. He no longer leaves the entire modelling job to the analysts either!
This interest has now extended to writing a Practical Introduction to Project Finance and a self training CD-ROM, A Guide to Project Finance, both for Euromoney. The development of generic Project- Finance modelling and risk matrices is the next field of endeavour.
