Chieko Barry
Senior Advisor
Ms. Chieko Barry is a highly experienced legal professional with a track record in international finance and development spanning over 30 years. Most recently, she served as Chief Counsel and Global Lead for the Equity Practice Group at the International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group. In this position, she led a team of lawyers and oversaw all legal aspects of IFC’s equity investments globally, including legal and regulatory issues, deal structuring, drafting, negotiations, compliance, policy and legal risk management. In addition, she oversaw IFC’s legal, policy and documentation standards setting for equity transactions.
Over her long career at the IFC, Ms. Barry served as lead counsel for a wide variety of deals in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, including a range of innovative financing structures. She led many IFC firsts - the first IFC investment in a private equity fund, its first securitized transaction involving non-bank institutional investors, and its first synthetic equity investment, structuring innovations that served as models for many of IFC’s subsequent transactions. In addition, she led corporate-wide initiatives with the venture capital, corporate governance, and equity teams at IFC. Prior to this work, she led and helped design IFC’s initiatives for mobilizing new ways of funding for clients from international capital markets, pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. She joined IFC from one of New York’s premier law firms, Debevoise & Plimpton, where she handled corporate finance, project finance, cross-border leasing and mergers & acquisitions deals as well as SEC regulatory compliance and private equity fund formation, working in the firm’s New York and Washington D.C. offices.
Ms. Barry holds a Juris Doctor in Law from the Yale Law School, where she was a senior member of the Editorial Board for The Yale Journal of International Law. She also holds a B.A. Magna Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. She serves on the Governing Council of Yale Women and is Chair of its Governance Committee.