“What has happened is the massive consolidation in the container fleet, and now the resulting mega container lines have decided to move into ports as well as part of the process,” he says. “We have been involved in some of the high-profile port financing, including the Multi-Link Terminals project in the Baltic, DCT Gdansk, where we acted for the lenders, and financing for developments at Valencia, again acting for the lenders.

“Subsequently we have been working on other development work including in Russia, the Ukraine and Africa – all expanding areas for us."

Norton Rose has just started work advising the Albanian government on financial issues relating to the Port of Durres. It has also been appointed to the Middle East panel for DP World – which it is advising on the London Gateway development in the UK.

“We are doing a mix of financial work, container terminal government advisory work and development work. And it is growing rapidly – there is a lot of development work coming up in the Middle East, Asia and Africa,” says Mr Brown.

One of the big challenges, he says, can be putting financial arrangements in place or agreeing concession terms in countries whose legal systems are not very developed.

Meanwhile, according to Ian Giles, from Norton Rose’s competition team, one of the current hot topics involves port services. “Are port authorities abusing dominant positions in terms of their control over prices offered to port users for services such as stevedoring, pilotage, towage, warehousing, etc.? Can the competition rules do anything about this?”

Secondly, he says, there are issues about investing in infrastructure. “As increasing numbers of shipping lines seek to reserve capacity in oversubscribed Northern European ports by taking an ownership interest, competition issues need to be considered; how should such deals be structured to avoid merger control requirements? To what extent are owners able to favour their own shipping lines without distorting competition?”