P3
P3 Results/Liberty Hall Advisors
Delivering innovative solutions for public problems
Our Team
Our professionals are recognized as seasoned international PPP experts with more than 50 years of combined PPP advisory experience globally in more than 70 countries.
John Buttarazzi
Founder
John Buttarazzi is a Certified Public-Private Partnership (PPP) professional with more than 25 years of experience. John has managed more than $3 billion in PPP projects, including the first commercial airport public-private partnership in the United States. He has assisted in the structuring a PPP arrangement for the management of Puerto Rico’s nine regional airports. He also drafted a PPP framework for Kurdistan, Iraq. John also prepared PPP pre-feasibility studies for a new marine fuel terminal and a grid-connected solar farm. He also assisted in drafting and delivering The Caribbean Public Private Partnership Toolkit, which includes a set of pragmatic tools to complement existing in-country capabilities. The Toolkit provides PPP practitioners with the basic knowledge for the effective selection and execution of PPP projects.
John served as Senior Vice President of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), New York State’s economic development arm. There he simultaneously managed the Public-Private Partnership Group (which he launched), International, and Business Development divisions. In that capacity he oversaw the operations of more than 20 foreign and domestic offices as well as the economic development financing section.
John has advised hundreds of U.S. and foreign government officials on various public-private partnership matters, including the establishment of guidelines and procedures and building capacity for PPP transactions. In addition to the United States, John has worked in Argentina, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, France, Ghana, Iraq, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Kuwait, Lesotho, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Qatar, Switzerland, Tanzania, Trinidad & Tobago, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
Mr. Buttarazzi received his Master of Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, with a concentration in Development and his Bachelor of Science, cum laude, from Washington & Lee University where he majored in Mathematics with significant course work in Economics and History. He is an Adjunct Professor with the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy where he teaches a graduate-level course on public-private partnerships. He has also served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
John is a former David Rockefeller Fellow. He is a member of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Team of Specialists on Public-Private Partnerships and is on the Board of Advisors for Mobilized Construction, which is developing community-based road maintenance programs in Africa.
Edward "Ned" White
Senior Consultant
Ned White is an international PPP and infrastructure investment specialist and with more than 27 years of experience in 58 countries, and he has conducted investment analyses and financing plans for more than $850 million of PPP investments in the ICT, eGov, education, health care, energy, transportation, and environmental services sectors. His areas of specialization include PPP procurement and transactions management, project finance, PPP feasibility analysis & financial modeling, PPP Guidelines & Manuals, PPP performance monitoring & contract management, as well as PPP capacity building & training. He has advised on over 110 PPP-related technical assistance and investment advisory assignments (many as Team Leader) for international donors and sponsors including the United States Agency for International Development, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, German Technical Cooperation Agency, and the Swedish International Development Agency and for dozens of developing country governments and public authorities.
Within Sub-Saharan Africa, he has managed and directed PPP advisory and capacity-building assignments in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, and Guinea. In Namibia, for the Ministry of Finance’s PPP Directorate and the African Development Bank (AfDB), he directed the PPP capacity building needs assessment and designed a comprehensive, integrated, and cumulative PPP capacity building program (2016). Also in Namibia he served as the PPP Capacity Building Specialist for the Ministry of Regional and Local Government and Housing, where he designed and delivered the 2-week PPP technical training workshop Municipal PPP Financial Analysis & Tariff-Setting (2003). In 2008-2009 he was Team Leader for the design of the PPP Strategy for the African Development Bank. He has also served on several specialist teams to assess and to design PPP policy, legal, institutional, and regulatory frameworks for PPPs in Kenya (2007), Malawi (2008), and Uganda (2010). He was also a member of the team that designed South Africa’s Municipal Infrastructure Investment Unit (MIIU) and its PPP Project Development Facility Grant Fund in 1997-1998. He has designed and conducted PPP Training Needs Assessments (TNAs) based on quantitative survey analyses and designed comprehensive PPP Training Programs and Curricula for Uganda (2004), Jordan (2011), Bangladesh (2012), Kosovo (2011-12), Azerbaijan (2012), and for the US Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (2014). Mr. White has designed, drafted several PPP Guidelines Manuals and Toolkits for PPP capacity building for Indonesia (2006), India (2006), Egypt (2007), for the World Bank’s InfoDev e-Government Program (2007), Ukraine (2009), Malawi (2009), Kosovo (2012), and Tanzania (2015).
Mr. White’s PPP investment analysis and project structuring experience includes: the $55 million water treatment BOT investment in Behiera, Egypt; the $62 million Independent Power Project at Sapugaskanda, Sri Lanka; the $175 million waste-to-energy incinerator BOT in Zagreb, Croatia; the $350 million Oranjestad Port & Waterfront Concession, Aruba; the $40 million Cloud Computing Project for the Government of Moldova; the $51 million e-Identity Verification PPP Project for Vietnam, and dozens of other investment projects. Over 21 years as an international trainer he has designed and directed dozens of technical training courses for over 11,000 officials worldwide on PPP procurements, transactions management, and PPP financing and investment models.
Ned received his M.A., with Distinction, in International Economics, from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, and he received his B.A. from Stanford University. He passed the Level I and Level II examinations for the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program of the CFA Institute.
Jack McDonald, CFA
Senior Consultant
Jack McDonald, CFA, is a project finance advisor and business consultant who works with Washington, DC policy-based lenders in their support of both domestic and international public private partnerships. His firm, Catawba International Advisors, LLC currently works with the US Department of Energy Loan Programs Office in support of innovative energy projects. He has often consulted with the Inter-American Development Bank and the US International Development Finance Corporation (USDFC) and serves as a subcontractor to major consulting firms such as Booz-Allen Hamilton, Inc. and Jones-Lang-LaSalle.
He is a regular instructor on topics such as “Project Finance” at the Institute of Public Private Partnerships. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Management, teaching management and international business courses at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business in Blacksburg, Virginia.
His over 30-year career includes U.S. commercial banking and international project finance with a focus on infrastructure and renewable energy finance. For several years at USDFC he specialized in private sector lending in Africa with a focus on East and Southern Africa and was based in Nairobi, Kenya in 1990-1991. Jack has also lived and worked in Santa Cruz, Bolivia and Washington, DC.
Jack attended Vanderbilt University where he received a BS in Engineering with a second major in Economics. He also received an MBA from Vanderbilt. Jack is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
Jacques Cook, Esq.
Senior Consultant
Jacques Cook is a legal expert in energy and infrastructure project finance and Public Private Partnership (PPP) procurement and transaction management. He has more than 30 years of experience working on project finance transactions for major infrastructure projects in the United States and overseas. He is also a seasoned instructor, consultant and advisor in his field.
From 2011 to June 2016, Mr. Cook was Senior PPP Advisor at Tetra Tech’s Institute for Public Private Partnerships (IP3) where he conducted training and other advisory services for governments and international organizations, focusing on legal aspects of PPPs and project finance.
In 2010 he served as a Vice President at Castalia Strategic Advisors in its Washington office where he carried out consulting assignments for the IFC, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, focused mainly on PPP projects in Africa and Latin America.
As a project finance attorney at the law firm Allen & Overy, LLP in New York from 2001-2006, Mr. Cook handled many PPP infrastructure transactions on behalf of developers primarily in Chile and Brazil. Two of Mr. Cook’s power projects in Brazil were listed as “Deals of the Year for Latin America” by Project Finance International Magazine. In Chile, he helped finalize some of the most ambitious and innovative toll road financings which also earned the title “Project Finance Deals of the Year.”
As a training specialist he has designed and delivered over 100 capacity building and training programs on energy and infrastructure PPP contract structuring and negotiation, transaction loan document drafting, project financing, procurement and contract management in over 40 countries including throughout Southern and Eastern Africa. He has also designed and managed over 30 of e-learning, online, video-based, and distance learning programs on all phases of the PPP project management and transaction cycle.
Prior to joining Allen & Overy, Mr. Cook spent more than 23 years as an attorney and manager at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). From 1994-2001, he was responsible for all legal work for the IDB’s project finance transactions and PPP projects. He worked on the IDB’s trailblazing and innovative financing packages for infrastructure and the Bank’s lending policies for the private sector.