Denton Wilde Sapte has promoted trade finance lawyer Matthew Cox to its partnership in the firm’s annual partner elections.

Cox specialises in trade and commodity finance, structured finance and project finance. He joined Denton Wilde Sapte as a trainee in 1999, and has spent four years working for the firm in Tokyo and one year in Dubai.

Cox will move to head up the firm’s new Singapore office in June. The office was launched in March 2009, and is focussed particularly on servicing trade finance clients in the region.

“Cox’s appointment is richly deserved and adds further strengths to the leadership of our market-leading international trade and export finance practice,” says head of international trade and export finance, Geoff Wynne.

Cox recently completed a secondment to Tokyo from 2008 to 2009, during which time he advised Sumitomo Chemical Company Limited as sponsor for the giant Petro-Rabigh oil refinery and petrochemical project in Saudi Arabia.

Alongside Cox and Wynne, Denton Wilde Sapte’s international trade and export finance practice also includes partners Joel Benjamin, Simon Cook, Neil Cuthbert, Nick Grandage and Jonathan Solomon.

The firm’s other newly-elected partners are Dean Alderton (Dubai, corporate); Sarah Dyke (London, asset finance); Udayan Mukherjee (Dubai, energy infrastructure & project finance), Tammy Samuel (London, EIPF), Almas Zhaiylgan (overseas partner, Almaty, EIPF).

The appointments take the firm’s total number of partners and overseas partners to 186 and are effective from May 1, 2009.