International Deal Making: Principles and Practice from Amar Alamar

Cross-border deals add layers that domestic transactions rarely face. Different legal systems, different regulators, different ways of doing business, and capital that has to move through structures that make sense in more than one place at once.

I have spent enough time on international work to treat that complexity as the job, not a surprise. The deals that struggle are often the ones where someone assumed the hard part was agreeing a price. Price is rarely the hard part. Getting the structure, the counterparties, the timing and the local realities into one workable path is.

A few principles tend to hold.

Prepare before you negotiate. Know the jurisdictions you are crossing, what approvals sit on the critical path, how funds move, and where a local partner or counsel is non-negotiable. Walking into a room without that map burns trust and time.

Align stakeholders early. Cross-border files usually involve more parties than a domestic deal: sponsors, lenders, local operators, counsel in more than one country, sometimes government or regulatory touchpoints. If those people are not roughly aligned on the commercial shape before you push into documentation, you will renegotiate the same points under pressure later.

Stay flexible on structure. The first structure that looks clean on a whiteboard often fails when you test it against tax, security, FX, enforcement or local ownership rules. Good international deal making is iterative. You keep the commercial outcome fixed and reshape the path until it can actually close.

Do the diligence properly. Distance makes it easier to skip soft facts: who really controls the asset, how disputes get resolved on the ground, what happens if a key local relationship breaks. Paper diligence is necessary. It is not enough on its own.

Patience is not optional. International timelines slip for reasons that are not laziness. Banks, registries, notaries and regulators move on their own clocks. Haste shows up as shortcuts in KYC, weak security packages, or closing conditions that cannot be met. Informed operators plan for that. Others learn it the expensive way.

In my view, international deal making rewards people who treat preparation, alignment, structure and diligence as the work itself. The ones who treat them as paperwork tend to find out why the deal took longer than the term sheet suggested.