As you can imagine, infrastructure projects require a very huge amount of money, and as you can appreciate, it is rare to see cases where one single bank is able to provide the whole bulk of financing for such kinds of projects. Very frequently what happens is that the borrower, the SPV, approaches, at the very beginning of the funding process, one bank, giving this bank the mandate to organize a group of lenders, or in technical words, a syndicate of banks. This bank that receives the mandate from the borrower to organize the bulk of financing takes the name of lead arranger, and it is also called MLA, where em stands for mandated, because this lead arranger receives the mandate from the borrower to organize the bulk of financing. This bulk of financing very frequently is on a fully committed basis, meaning that the MLA is committed to provide the whole bulk of financing, even if, for whatever reason, the syndication loan market is completely closed, and so the MLA is not able to find any other banks that can jump on board in sharing this commitment with the MLA itself. As you can understand, one of the main risks that the MLA is facing is not to find other banks that together with them, can provide financing to the borrower, the SPV. In order to avoid this risk, one of the typical strategies that is in the syndication loan market the MLA typically uses, is to start first, to assemble a very small group of very huge banks that can share the commitment to provide financing to the SPV with the MLA itself. This group is typically formed by other banks, that typically are qualified as co-lead arrangers. They are also known as underwriters. The technical term underwriter indicates that the bank is committing funds to the borrower. Meaning that, if the market for whatever reason is not able to share the risk, these banks together with the MLA, will provide the exact amount of funding that the borrower, the SPV, needs to carry out the infrastructure project. At the end of this first stage, you have formed a group which is concentrated on a very small number of banks. The MLA on one side, and the Co-Lead arrangers on the other side. For example, if we take the case of a large project that the Disney Corporation set up many years ago. For the management and construction of the Hong Kong International Theme Park, you can appreciate that the group of underwriters formed by the MLA at the time, JP Morgan Chase, and the owner was composed by seven banks. You have one MLA and six sub-underwriters, Co-Lead Arrangers. Once the group of underwriters has been formed, both the MLA and the other underwriters, try to sell down portions of the loan in the market to other banks that are interested in lending money to this particular kind of infrastructure. In general, lending banks are organized in different tiers. And the tiers are proportional to the amount that you typically lend to the borrower. In general, there are different qualifications corresponding to the level of lending that you will typically provide to the borrower itself. For example, if we refer again to the case of the Hong Kong International Theme Park. The development and construction of the leisure park by Disney, in the Hong Kong region. The base of the syndicate was formed by a certain number of banks. First of all, the group of arranging banks, or arrangers. In this case they were formed by 18 arrangers, that were taking responsibility for the biggest portions of funding. Then Disney and JP Morgan Chase invited additional banks. In particular three Co-arrangers taking responsibility for smaller portions of the loan. And then the bottom part of the pyramid, was formed by the banks that are providing the least amount of funding to SPV itself. In this case, they were two plus two lead managers. Overall, you can count the total number of banks that in that specific project, considering the huge amount of projects. We were talking about 3.3 billion Hong Kong dollars at the time, it was April 2000. We had the final group of 32 banks. So you can imagine the complexity to administer and to manage such a big group of lenders. In addition to these typical roles of the syndicate include, at least, a couple of additional roles. The first one is the Documentation Bank. The documentation bank is the bank that takes the responsibility to file and organize all the finance documentation that is prepared during the negotiations of the lending process. And you can understand how complex this kind of task is. Considering the very large number of banks involved. And the large number of documents that must be prepared in order to arrive to the closing of the transaction. The second important role that is performed in the syndicate, is called Agent Bank. The agent bank acts as a representative of the syndicate. And essentially plays a very important role, although it seems a little bit trivial. And you can imagine which is this role. The agent, first of all, must collect the money from the syndicate. And then transfer this money to the borrower when the borrower calls the money that is needed to finance the infrastructure. On the other side, when the construction is finished and the infrastructure is ready to go. The borrower will have to return money to the syndicate. And the most obvious thing, is that the repayment of the syndicate will be done by the borrower to the agent bank. And via the agent bank to all the other members of the syndicate. In general, what happens is that both the documentation bank and the agent bank, can be the same banks that typically are included into the group of underwriters. It is not unfrequent that the MLA plays also the role of agent bank or of the documentation bank. Sometimes other underwriters can play the same role.