Kirkland Advises Noteholders on Kaisa’s Successful US$16 Billion Restructuring

Kirkland & Ellis advised the ad hoc group of noteholders (AHG) on the successful restructuring of over USD16 billion offshore liabilities of Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd. (HKEx: 1638).

The restructuring closed on September 15, 2025, following sanction of the multi-layer, inter-conditional and parallel schemes of arrangement by the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong and British Virgin Islands Courts. This is one of Asia’s most significant and largest restructurings of Chinese property developers in the current sector-wide crisis, and one of the largest schemes of arrangement by value ever sanctioned by the Hong Kong Court to date.

Kirkland has played an instrument role in advising the AHG, which holds over US$4 billion of Kaisa’s offshore notes, throughout the ongoing restructuring negotiation and implementation process spanning over 3 years, including with respect to timely escalation strategies to enhance negotiation leverage, innovative and complex implementation structures, bespoke credit and downside protections for the post-restructuring debt and equity instruments.

This transaction marks another successful representation by Kirkland of noteholders in the offshore debt restructuring of a major PRC real estate developer, and also the second successful offshore debt restructuring of Kaisa which Kirkland has acted on for the noteholders following the first in 2016.

The Kirkland team included restructuring lawyers Neil McDonald, Wei-Yang Lim, Anthony Wijaya, Kevin Leung, Henry Zhang and Rebecca Zhou; capital markets lawyers Cedric Van den Borren, Rohan Sahai and Katherine Hu; debt finance lawyers Jacqueline Zheng, Karen Ho, Sean Zhang, Johnson Man and Esther Guo; corporate lawyers Mengyu Lu, Joey Chau, Sherry Fu, Sierra Tao, Siyu Zhao and Derek Zheng; and litigation lawyers Richard Boynton and Stuart Doxford.