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UK

Chris Willison

Partner

England & Wales

020 3319 3700

chris.willison@keystonelaw.co.uk

Chris works with both lenders and borrowers, advising on all aspects of financial facilities. His regular clients include asset-based lenders, finance houses, banks, trade financiers, platform funders and their clients.

Chris is experienced in asset-based lending, supply chain finance, factoring, invoice discounting, commercial lending, syndicated lending, trade finance and back-to-back finance. He is an expert in documenting financial facilities, securing these financial facilities, bespoke documentation relating to them, their structuring and variation.

Additionally, Chris also assists SMEs with business funding for sales and purchases, as well as offering general commercial contract advice. He has particular expertise in issues relating to finance in the recruitment sector.

Chris is also an experienced litigator and has a wealth of experience of enforcing financial facilities, fraud containment and asset recovery.

Expertise

Chris specialises in trade finance, financial facilities, and resolving issues with finance within the recruitment sector, providing tailored solutions to meet complex banking and finance challenges for diverse clients.

Experience

  • Advised an asset-based lender on its financing part of the secondary participation in a finance syndicate worth €4.2 billion for a major pan-European wholesale catering service supplier.
  • Drafted a suite of trade finance documents for a client providing trade finance under English law to businesses in sub-Saharan Africa and helping that client commence trading with facilities initially in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Rwanda, Cote d’Ivoire and Sudan.
  • Drafted a suite of core lending documents for the asset-based lending division of a challenger bank and then additional documentation for its receivables, plant and machinery, inventory, property finance, bad debt protection and back-to-back lending facilities.
  • Advised and assisted a client with restructuring its finance business.
  • Advised UK Finance (formerly the Asset Based Finance Association) and the representatives of its member banks and finance houses on issues in the recruitment sector.
  • Advised the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo) in respect of its Code of Conduct for Recruitment Process Outsourcers and Managed Service Providers.

Chris acts in complex fraud and asset recovery matters, including commercial and guarantor litigation. He regularly advises on finance-related disputes, particularly in the recruitment sector, and broader debt recovery.

Experience

  • Worked for various finance houses enforcing terms of personal and corporate guarantees and indemnities.
  • Obtained local and worldwide injunctions to stop fraud and secure assets to enable recoveries for financiers, including requiring the delivery up of an individual’s passport where a flight risk was identified.
  • Recovered assets from corporate and individual debtors where they had paid monies in spite of notice of an assignment, requiring them to pay twice.
  • Recovered assets shipped into the country by a trade supplier in defeating claims by an Insolvency Practitioner that goods could not be identified by serial numbers to specific invoiced, but unpaid, debts.

Please note: The experience list above may include examples of work completed prior to joining Keystone Law.

Recognition

Recognised by The Legal 500 for Civil Fraud 2024–2025

Member of the Nova Scotia Barristers Society (Canada)

Chris qualified as a solicitor in 1992. Prior to joining Keystone Law in 2022, he worked at the following firms:

  • Francis Wilks & Jones
  • Michelmores
  • Squire Patton Boggs