Mr. Zanella is a Vice President in Houlihan Lokey’s Financial Restructuring Group. He has substantial experience advising companies, creditors, and sponsors regarding liability management, in- and out-of-court restructurings, traditional and distressed mergers and acquisitions, capital raising, and corporate finance assignments across a variety of industries. Mr. Zanella is based in the firm’s São Paulo office.
Representative publicly disclosed assignments include the 2026 bondholders of Volcan on liability management; Air Methods on its prepackaged Chapter 11; Citibank on the Chapter 11 of Revlon; Voyant Beauty on its capital structure refinancing; Belk on its one-day prepackaged Chapter 11; Peabody Energy on its out-of-court debt exchange; Neiman Marcus on its Chapter 11; the first lien lenders in the Chapter 11 of Foresight Energy; Peabody Energy on its withdrawn Powder River Basin joint venture with Arch Resources; and Peabody Energy on its acquisition of the Shoal Creek mine.
Prior to joining Houlihan Lokey, Mr. Zanella was a Vice President in the Restructuring & Capital Solutions group at Lazard and a member of the firm’s Midwest Advisory group, where he provided M&A, capital markets, and shareholder activism defense advice to metals and mining and industrials companies. Prior to that, he worked as an equity derivatives sales trader at Morgan Stanley in São Paulo, where he was involved in pricing, managing, and distributing a variety of global derivative products to Latin American clients. Mr. Zanella has held other roles in equity research and venture debt underwriting.
Mr. Zanella holds a B.S. in Economics from Insper Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.