Fratres means brothers.

Trust in this business is not warmth. It is the absence of a second version. What we tell an investor about a regulatory risk is what we have already told the sponsor, and what appears in a submission to an authority is what we would put in a diligence pack. Anything else survives only until the two parties speak to each other directly, which they eventually do.

That has a cost, and the cost is the point. It means telling a client a project is not viable when our fee depends on it proceeding. It means telling a sponsor that the partner they favour will not survive diligence. Advice that only pays when a transaction happens is not advice, and engagements are structured so that our judgement is not for sale with the work.

It also means the firm carries the consequences of being wrong rather than distributing them. Where we have misjudged a timeline or misread a requirement, the client hears it from us first, in writing, with what it changes.

A project that crosses jurisdictions accumulates advisers. Each holds a fragment of the picture and none is accountable for the whole, so the gaps between them become the client’s problem. Unity, for us, means the client deals with a single firm that carries the entire position and does not disclaim the parts of it that are inconvenient.

In practice: one partner is accountable from enquiry to handover; specialists drawn onto a mandate work to that partner rather than in parallel; and where an external adviser is appointed, we remain responsible for integrating their work into the whole rather than treating it as somebody else’s file.

Externally it means one position, not two. A project is not described one way to a ministry and another way to a lender. The version that goes into a public submission is the version we would defend in a data room, because in a market this size those rooms are connected.

We are frequently the newest party to a project and rarely the most important one. Local sponsors have carried the opportunity for years. Officials understand the constraint better than any external adviser will. The client’s own lawyers and engineers hold the technical position. Collaboration means working with that rather than displacing it to enlarge our own role.

Where a client has existing counsel, we work to them. Where a local partner has genuine capability, we build the mandate around it instead of importing a substitute. Where an authority has a preferred process, we follow it rather than seeking an exception — exceptions are the most expensive thing a foreign investor can be granted, because they have to be defended every year afterwards.

The test is whether the counterparties are stronger at the end of an engagement than at the start. A firm that makes itself indispensable has usually made its client fragile.

Most of the damage done to foreign investment in emerging markets is done by parties who were only ever going to be present once. The incentives of a single transaction and the incentives of a market are not the same, and a firm intending to work in one country for a decade cannot behave as though each mandate is the last.

This shows up in ordinary decisions rather than in statements. We do not accept a mandate we cannot staff properly because the fee is attractive. We do not take a position that would be profitable once and unusable for the following five years. We remain contactable after completion, when the questions are unglamorous — a reporting condition, a drawdown obligation, a change of official, a supplier who has stopped answering.

The horizon is also why we publish no client list. A relationship that is used as a credential the moment it closes was a transaction. One that is still useful to both parties in the fifth year rarely needs advertising.