Group of figures on an elevated site walkway reviewing drawings against open ground

Our story

The disciplines a mandate actually requires.

Fratres is a partnership of practitioners. This page describes the disciplines the firm brings to an engagement and how a team is composed against them.

How the firm is composed

Mandates are staffed against disciplines, not handed to a generalist.

The work Fratres does is not one profession. A single mandate can require a developer who has taken infrastructure from concept to close, a financier who can structure around a limited-recourse lender, somebody who has sat on the public side of a regulatory decision, an engineer able to test a feasibility assumption, a lawyer who reads Bangladeshi and English documents with equal care, and a delivery team physically present at the site.

No individual holds all six. The firm is organised so that each is available to every engagement, and so that a client is never told a question is out of scope when it is in fact outside one person’s training.

Engagements are led by a partner who remains accountable from first enquiry to handover. Specialists are drawn in as the mandate requires and are accountable to that partner rather than working in parallel to them. The composition of the team, and the identity of every person who will work on the file, is disclosed to the client before work begins.

The disciplines

Six disciplines, and what each contributes.

These are the capabilities a project in this market consumes. They are listed by contribution rather than by seniority, because a mandate rarely needs them in the order an organisation chart would suggest.

Infrastructure project development

Turning a proposal into something that can be financed.

The discipline that knows what a project has to become before anyone will fund it: site identification and land assembly, demand assessment, technical option selection, procurement route, and the order in which those have to be settled. Most projects that stall in Bangladesh stall because they were taken to market as an idea rather than developed into a project. This is the discipline that prevents that, and the one that most often recommends waiting.

Typical output

A development plan with dependencies, owners and dates attached.

Structured and project finance

Making the numbers survive a credit committee.

Capital structure, limited-recourse debt, development and concessional finance, currency and offtake risk allocation, and the covenant package that determines what a sponsor can still do after close. Applied early, this discipline is also the fastest way to establish what is not financeable — a conclusion that is far cheaper in month two than in month twenty.

Typical output

A funding structure, a defensible base case, and the conditions precedent that will actually bind.

Public policy and regulatory affairs

Reading a decision from the side that has to make it.

The approvals architecture across BIDA, BEZA, the PPP Authority, Bangladesh Bank and the relevant sector regulators; the statutory basis for each consent; the internal route a submission travels before anyone signs it; and the public objective a project must serve to be defensible once it is built. Experience on the public side of a decision is what separates institutional engagement from speculation about it.

Typical output

An approvals map: every consent, its owner, its statutory basis and a realistic sequence.

Sector engineering advisory

Testing the assumption the whole case rests on.

Independent technical review across power, ports, aviation, transport, resources and urban systems — capacity and throughput assumptions, capital cost estimates, interface and integration risk, construction programme, and whole-life operating cost. The function is adversarial by design: to find the untested assumption before a lender’s independent engineer finds it, when it is still an internal matter.

Typical output

A technical position the client can defend in diligence, and a list of what still has to be surveyed.

Legal and compliance

Documents that hold, and controls that are applied.

Contract architecture and governing law, joint venture and shareholder arrangements, repatriation and tax treatment, dispute resolution, and the firm’s own financial crime controls — counterparty due diligence, beneficial ownership verification, sanctions screening, conflicts and anti-bribery. This discipline holds a veto inside the firm: it can stop a mandate the commercial side wants, and it has been used for that purpose.

Typical output

A verified counterparty file, a recorded conflicts position, and a documentation structure agreed before drafting begins.

On-the-ground delivery

Being present where the project actually is.

Sustained local presence through the long middle of an engagement: site visits, attendance at meetings that were arranged the day before, following a file through an institution in person, and engagement with landowners and affected communities in their own language. None of this can be done from another time zone, and a large share of what is later attributed to bureaucracy is more accurately a failure of presence.

Typical output

Continuous first-hand reporting in place of second-hand assurance.

How a mandate is staffed

Accountability sits with a person, not a department.

A client should always know who is responsible for the whole of their engagement and who is doing the work in front of them. Those two questions have a single answer each, given at the outset and not revised for our convenience.

Where the firm does not hold a capability to the standard a mandate requires, we appoint or recommend an external specialist and say plainly that we have done so. We do not present borrowed capability as our own, and we do not staff a mandate we cannot staff properly in order to keep it.

AccountabilityOne lead partner, enquiry to handover

Team compositionDisclosed in writing before work begins

SpecialistsDrawn in by discipline, not availability

Client contactDirect with the responsible partner

External appointmentsNamed and disclosed as external

HandoverDocumented, to a named client team

A note on biographies

Fratres does not publish partner biographies on this website. Full curricula vitae, professional references, regulatory and disciplinary history, and conflict declarations for every individual proposed to work on a mandate are provided directly to the counterparty during engagement discussions — before any engagement letter is signed, and in a form that can be verified independently.

This is ordinary practice for advisory firms whose work sits close to public decision-making. A published roster of names is read as a claim of access rather than a statement of experience. It is quoted by third parties who have no relationship with the firm, and it has been used elsewhere in this market to imply influence that does not exist.

Withholding names from a public page while providing them in full to the parties actually entitled to assess us is the more accountable of the two positions, not the less. Any prospective counterparty who wants to know precisely who they would be working with should ask, and will be told.

Governance and integrity

About us

What the firm is, how engagements are structured, who we work with, and the things we explicitly do not do.

The firm

Our story

The Fratres name

Latin for brothers. The thinking behind a name about kinship, and the four values it commits the partnership to.

Editorial

How we work

Our approach

The engagement model, and how the four capabilities are applied together on a single mandate.

Method

Enquiries

Meeting the people who would do the work

Introductions to the partners who would lead a mandate, together with their full biographies and conflict declarations, are made early in any engagement discussion. Enquiries are reviewed by the partnership and answered directly.

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