Aleksandra Finelli has joined Aird & Berlis in Toronto as a partner in its real estate group.
She brings experience handling acquisitions and dispositions, development, financing and leasing in commercial real estate. She has assisted clients with conducting due diligence, title review, and deal closing.
Finelli has worked on major merger and acquisition deals, public-private partnerships, green energy projects, senior housing, and gaming facilities’ privatization. Her clients have included pension funds, real estate investment trusts, and developers of residential, mixed-use, industrial and commercial projects.
She has also represented senior and mezzanine lenders and borrowers, as well as landlords and tenants in the office, retail and industrial sectors. She concentrates on construction financing and maintains a substantial leasing practice.
Lexpert ranked Finelli as a repeatedly recommended lawyer in the category “real estate – property development.” She was among the lawyers who worked on the 2013 deal involving the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League’s US$150 million take-out financing of existing loan facilities while she was with DLA Piper.
She also helped guide Precision Castparts Corp. through its 2012 acquisition of Centra Industries Inc while she was with Stoel Rives LLP. During her 20-year stint with Bennett Jones LLP, she acted for the agents and the bondholders on the 2012 financing of Bay Adelaide Centre's West Tower with $405 million, 10-year first mortgage bonds.
Moreover, Finelli helped advise Niagara Acquisition LP, a joint venture between KingSett Real Estate Growth LP No. 3 and its affiliates and certain clients of Alberta Investment Management Corp, as it acquired ING Groep N.V. and ING Industrial Fund’s 50 percent indirect stakes in ING Summit Industrial Fund LP in 2010. ING Groep shifted the entirety of its interest in ING Real Estate Canada LP, Summit’s manager, to Niagara as well. The aggregate purchase price came to about $2 billion, factoring in assumed debt.
She was a partner with Gowling WLG for over three years before moving to Aird & Berlis, according to LinkedIn.
Finelli is part of the Toronto Commercial Real Estate Women group. She was called to the Ontario bar in 2004 after receiving her LLB from Western University in 2003.