GC Powerlist Middle East

One of the most exciting and high-profile development in the last twelve months of the Middle Eastern business timeline was the successful merger of First Gulf Bank and National Bank of Abu Dhabi, which was completed in April 2017. This momentous endeavour combines the resources of two of the most prominent banks in the region to create the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, putting the bank in an excellent position for the future. Samer Abdelhaq now leads the combined legal function for the new banking giant as group general counsel, having previously been in charge of National Bank of Abu Dhabi’s legal operations. He is proud of the significant role he played in the merger. ‘Advising NBAD, and later on FAB, on the merger with FGB’, he explains, ‘has been the highlight of my career and an experience like no other. We had to use our best judgment within a challenging timeline; I’m proud of what was done and even prouder of the team who supported me throughout the process’, Abdelhaq concludes. Indeed, he speaks extremely positively of his team for their technical expertise and conscientious attitude towards their role in the success of the bank. ‘They are professionally qualified with globally recognized law societies and syndicates,’ he states, ‘and are all committed to the journey and strategy of our institution and enjoy working for FAB in Abu Dhabi’. The effectiveness of the team both individually and collectively is due in no small part to Abdelhaq’s role in building and focusing it during his tenure, as he explains: ‘I have developed the legal department of NBAD, now FAB, from a small team of professional lawyers into specialized teams of globally qualified lawyers who specialize in the various areas of FAB’s specific areas of expertise’. Prior to moving in-house in 2008, Abdelhaq had a successful private practice career with Simmons & Simmons and Allen & Overy, and he recalls that taking the decision to move in-house was a significant one. He relates that ‘moving in house was a big decision for me; I wanted to be closer to the decision making process and be involved in the strategic development of my clients’. With these personal goals in mind, it is clear that Abdelhaq’s career as an in-house lawyer has been an unqualified success so far.

Soliman Abdel-Meguid is a vastly experienced and distinguished lawyer in the Middle East and the banking sector. His professional legal career began in Egyptian public prosecution between 1962 and 1982 where he eventually worked as deputy attorney general and judge. He then joined the banking sector starting with Al-Ahli Bank (ABK) in Kuwait as the head of legal affairs. During the 1990 Iraqi invasion, Abdel-Meguid worked with ABK’s Kuwaiti authority to protect the bank’s and its clients’ legal rights. He recalls that when the state purchased outstanding customer debts to Kuwaiti banks after the invasion, ‘I served as a senior member of the Debts Purchase Committee to unify the legal principles among Kuwaiti banks that govern the purchased debts. This was a watershed moment for the stability of the Kuwaiti banking sector at a time of crisis’. Abdel-Meguid left ABK in 2001 as General Manager to join the NBK in 2001 and worked as general counsel—head of legal affairs until the end of May 2017. During this period Abdel-Meguid demonstrated his skill in crisis management again during the global financial crash and subsequent fall in oil prices which created further market insecurity. ‘I played a leading role in overseeing the legal aspects of debt-restructuring in a multitude of high profile cases’, he says. At present, Abdel-Meguid is general counsel to NBK’s executive management team. During his time at the company, Abdel-Meguid has deepened NBK’s dependence on its own legal resources by enhancing the productivity of the legal staff and departmentalising the team into specialised units and deepened the expertise within each unit. He is valued both internally and externally for his regulatory work too, ‘I closely monitor parliament discussions of draft laws that are relevant to the banking sector. I study the drafts and issue my opinion on it to ensure that Kuwaiti banks are prepared to deal with the legal implications of forthcoming legislation. I also circulate my legal opinion to the Kuwaiti Banks Association in order to unify the Kuwaiti banks’ positions before the draft becomes law‘. Given his experience, Abdel-Meguid’s legacy is extensive – he continues to train lawyers, some of whom are now general counsel and heads of legal departments in other Kuwaiti banks and institutions. He has lectured and been guest speaker at a number of universities in the Arab world including Oran University, Ain Shams and al-Azhar universities in Egypt and Institute for Banking Studies in Kuwait. Abdel-Meguid has also authored several academic legal publications.

The domestic luxury retail company, UAE Trading, opened the first boutique store offering luxury brands to the domestic market, back in 1972. Today it owns and operates 24 multi-brand boutiques under its Rodeo Drive and Via Rodeo trading names as well as 23 mono-brand franchise stores. Tri-lingual lawyer Zeina Abillamah initially joined UAE Trading in 2011 as legal counsel but having excelled in the role was promoted in 2014 to her current position, senior legal counsel and head of the legal department. Working with her team of lawyers, Abillamah provides legal support in English, Arabic, and French and is responsible for the day to day supervision, management and output for all of UAE Trading’s commercial legal work. During her time at the company she has worked on a variety of complex commercial contracts, developed in-house agreements and advised senior management on laws impacting the company’s functional areas. UAE Trading is Abillamah’s first taste of in-house life. Before she joined she was an associate at IAA Law firm for just over four years. Part of Abillamah’s success is down to her commitment to constantly learn, and in recent years she has studied M&A courses at the New York Institute of Finance and contracts law at Harvard Law School.

Abdul Latif Jameel is a Saudi Arabia based diversified business comprised of independent entities that operate in financial services, automotive, real estate and many other sectors. Maintaining consistently excellent legal support in a challenging environment, Waleed Abkam possesses 25 years of experience gained both in-house and private practice. In his current position of chief legal counsel, Abkam ensures that the company operates in line with the law, develops policies and codes, reviews contracts and presents status reports to the CEO and senior company management. In addition, utilising his strong management, leadership and negotiation skills, Abkam closes major transactions smoothly, while managing a highly motivated team of in-house lawyers. Abkam’s former career features an abundance of senior legal positions at leading regional Saudi companies, namely Mobily, Savola Group, SABIC and SPIMACO.

Operating across the entire hydrocarbon value chain, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is one of the world’s largest oil companies by production, and has played a key role in Abu Dhabi’s global emergence over its 46-year history. Chief legal counsel, Salem Mohammed Al Darei, has been at ADNOC since 2012 but took his current position in May 2016 after demonstrating his legal nous and value to the company as a divisional manager and acting director. In 2017 alone, Al Darei has been involved in several key strategic deals for ADNOC. One such deal worth $1.63bn saw ADNOC’s subsidiary, National Drilling Company (NDC), acquire nine state-of-the-art offshore rigs in April. A month later, ADNOC signed a Memorandum of Understanding in front of Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed and Austria’s Chancellor Christian Kern with Austrian oil and gas company OMV to explore potential opportunities to work together to support ADNOC’s downstream businesses and the company’s smart growth strategy. In the same month, Al Darei oversaw the conclusion of the company’s agreement with Penthol to be its exclusive seller of Group III base oil sales in the US. Al Darei also oversaw ADNOC’s agreement with Borealis ‘under which the companies will advance two key projects that will expand both ADNOC and Borealis downstream petrochemicals business and support the delivery of ADNOC’s integrated smart growth and partnership strategy’, according to an official press release. The company recently announced the expansion of its partnership model for the entire value chain as well as the more active management of its portfolio of assets and with already having begun talks with potential Asian partners on the new expanded partnership approach, Al Darei will continue to play a pivotal role in facilitating ADNOC’s successful future.

Arab Bank is one of the largest financial services companies in the Middle East, and holds a place in history as the first private financial institution founded in the Arab world. Originally founded in Jerusalem in 1930, the bank is now headquartered in Amman, Jordan, but with clients and branches across five continents. The task of safeguarding the legal affairs of the growing bank currently falls to Basem Al-Imam, who has a dual role of head of legal affairs and board secretary. As part of the senior management at Arab Bank, Al-Imam has not only facilitated a number of financings and transactions, but has also contributed to some of the most important bank-wide strategic decisions in recent years. Under his watch, Arab Bank has been part of a number of regional legal and compliance initiatives, which demonstrate the bank’s commitment to the safety and security of its clients. Al-Imam and the team have been kept busy over the years contesting a number of legal battles in the courts, with a very high success rate.

The Oman Investment Fund is sovereign wealth fund that was established in 2006, and provides medium to long-term investments, globally and domestically across several market sectors in order to diversify the government of Oman’s asset base and create a pool of sustainable cash flows for the Sultanate. Duraid Al Jamali is the head of legal at the Oman Investment Fund, and is well-known for supplying an outstanding amount of legal knowledge to the company on applicable matters. In addition, he is charged with providing support on several company committees, and plays a key role in liaising with both government and non-governmental organisations. Day to day work for Al Jamali includes a requirement to review and draft all agreements, draft and review internal policies and procedures, negotiate agreements on behalf of the Fund and provide advice on all other ad hoc legal issues. Able to not only draw upon skills within the organisation, Al Jamali is prudent at liaising and coordinating with external counsel to ensure the Fund receives the support it needs.

Mohammed Al Noor is group chief legal officer and international advisor for internationally-invested Action Group Holdings, an investment company headquartered in Kuwait with subsidiaries in Europe, North America, Australia, and the MENA region. He is the ideal individual for the role given immense experience accrued during his private practice career by advising leading Kuwaiti family offices and private clients, managing cross-border private deals and transactions, handling matters involving commercial and corporate M&A works, and establishing joint ventures (JV) with foreign companies including in the oil and gas sector. Al Noor emphasises the scale and variety of his day-to-day role from the outset, and that Kuwait and other GCC countries have a very unique business culture and traditions which any legal officer has to respect. ‘As chief general counsel’, he explains, ‘I have increasingly faced new and complex legal issues arising from the accelerating growth of our global business and international operations, which have given us much to consider in how to get effective legal services around the globe’. He has developed an all-encompassing strategy to deal with the key issues facing the legal team of Action Group Holdings. ‘Firstly, I focused on the in-house team’s structure and performance’, he outlines, ‘as ensuring that our law department is working at utmost efficiency meant it had to be aligned internally within the department on key factors and externally with the strategic needs of the business. Secondly’, he goes on, ‘I developed an action plan on legal department cost control and devised a plan on executing this, and thirdly I focused on implementing a plan to reduce legal costs while maintaining quality through the introduction of IT solutions and software’. Al Noor has fostered a relationship with owners, shareholders, and senior management in which the legal team is delegated more and more responsibility as time goes on through a proactive approach: ‘as GC, I bring to the CEO and company environment a style that emphasises providing alternative strategies for dealing with issues rather than simply pointing out obstacles. This type of relationship with CEO gives me as GC an integrated role into the business of a company which can make all the difference’, concludes Al Noor.

One of the most talked about business events globally in recent memory is the upcoming IPO of Saudi Aramco, perhaps unsurprisingly for a company whose value is often estimated in the trillions of dollars. The legal groundwork for such a deal, given the size of the business and the fact that it has been a state-owned entity for many years, is highly complex and demanding of the Aramco legal team’s abilities. Heading up the legal function for this mega-company is Nabeel Al Mansour, who was made general counsel and corporate secretary in May 2016. He presides over a team that has increased massively in both size and expertise in recent years, achieving a triple-figure headcount in 2015 amid a significant expansion group-wide. Al Mansour progressed to his current position after only a year as deputy general counsel and three years as an associate general counsel while with Aramco, during which he was involved in oil concession agreements with Chevron and an expansion of the company’s gas business. His rapid rise to the top, indicative of the esteem in which he is held by the executive management of the company, means that Al Mansour is the ideal individual to lead the legal support of this phenomenally important organisation into a new chapter in its history.

Hessa Al-Twaijri emphasises the need for in-house lawyers to get to grips with the upper management of their businesses as much as possible: ‘The more you engage with top management and senior management, the more you understand what the business needs and what it is about in order to protect it, and how to ensure that we achieve our goals’. It is this approach, prizing a thorough understanding of company objectives and strategy, which laid the foundations for her extremely successful career to date. Beginning her in-house career in 1993 with Kuwait National Petroleum Company, by 2007 she had risen to the rank of team leader for projects and operations at the hugely prestigious oil company before moving over to Petrochemical Industries Company (PIC). She now fulfils the role of legal manager and secretary of the board, providing the benefit of her immense experience to high-level executive meetings focusing on company strategy. On the cooperation between the legal function and upper management, Al-Twaijri says, ‘we have a fantastic relationship, communicating with each other and deliberating with them on specific cases that are of particular importance to the company’. She has been particularly successful in closing M&A transactions since at PIC, and has also supported a number of highly important joint ventures for the company, creating real added value in the process. Given her collaborative approach towards legal work, Al-Twaijri believes greater community between in-house lawyers in the Middle East through dedicated professional organisations would be a great help to all corporate counsel in the region. ‘Within the Middle East in-house legal world, we often don’t know each other as there are few forums that allows to share knowledge. We need to communicate with other businesses, in the same way that doctors or engineers do through their professional organisations’, Al-Twaijri advises.

The Executive Affairs Authority is tasked with providing up to date strategic policy advice to the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces. As such, it has a highly important role to play in the prevailing legislative and regulatory environment in Abu Dhabi, with corresponding effects on the business landscape there. Alfrayhat is the chief legal counsel for this pivotal governmental organisation and is therefore one of the most important in-house legal professionals in the UAE in many respects. He has huge experience in the role, having been engaged with the Executive Affairs Authority for many years. In particular, his role in drafting proposals based around regulatory oversight of a number of key markets for the government has been particularly of note.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Council (ADIC) is one of the primary investment arms of the government of Abu Dhabi, operating and enlarging a highly varied portfolio of investments. The diversified and global nature of the interests which ADIC manages require a variety in skillset above and beyond what would expected of many GCs, and the ideal individual to fulfil this role needs to have an enviable array of experience to draw from. Fortunately, ADIC’s general counsel Kurt Alfrey has such a high-profile résumé. He is a financial specialist, and his immense experience in the sector made him an ideal candidate for ADIC’s legal function; in 2016 he joined them in a high-profile move. He shares with his company the goal of ensuring continued financial success and wealth protection for Abu Dhabi into the future.

At the forefront of the legal financial sector of Kuwait, Dr. Fayez Al Kandari leads the legal department at Boubyan Bank, one of the emerging banks within the country, and is a well-known figure within the industry having over 25 of experience in the field related to both local and international disputes. In addition to his general counsel role, Al Kandari holds several other important positions that enable him to provide a more informed, industry-leading perspective to his work. Al Kandari has an academic role as a professor of private law at Kuwait University and is also the legal counsel for the Kuwait Banking Association. He is a judicial arbitrator at the Ministry of Justice and a local and international arbitrator and conciliator. Al Kandari is a key figure during all of the most significant cases and transactions the bank and its subsidiaries is involved in, he cites a ‘key role’ played by his legal department in a pioneering issuance of a sukuk under new financial regulations, the first of its kind that ‘complies with the provisions of the Islamic Shari’a’, and provided a massive endorsement of the high potential of the Kuwaiti financial sector and the diligent work of Al Kandari. Assisting with moulding not only the discourse around financial law in the country, Al Kandari has participated in the active development and modification of ‘key legislation’ in Kuwait, having worked closely with government legislators in the drafting of the legislation ensuring ‘private sector interests and views are represented’. He claims: ‘the legal department has a pivotal role in achieving effective economic unity between the bank and its subsidiaries through its legal supervision and representation and follow-up of its work and as its key support.’ Ensuring efficiency and optimal results, he states: ‘The legal department has worked diligently in negotiating and collecting debts without resorting to the court route by increasing employee education on the issue and setting the procedures in place to encourage its use.’ Delivering outstanding results encompassing a ‘high success rate in cases handled of over 90%, delivering a pre-set number of workships, courses and visits that benefit the Bank and its employees’, Al Kandari and his team offer real added value to their business.

Feras Alkasab is unequivocal about the positives that in-house legal work can bring to any ambitious legal professional: ‘Going in-house is an absolute must for lawyers as it is an eye-opening experience into the businesses they support. As an in-house lawyer, you get a really good sense of what your advice does and how it impacts your client, and this is part of the appeal of working at Sidra’. Sidra Medical and Research Center, a state-of-the-art academic medical centre in Doha, has employees representing over 80 nationalities from clinical staff, to scientists, researchers and administrators. Alkasab welcomes the challenge of working in a diverse environment such as this and finds it particularly stimulating to witness life-changing innovation being created around precision medicine and biomedical research. On the regulatory side, ‘my team often gets consulted as a stakeholder when new data privacy, research and medical legislations are being developed, as we are often in the best position to inform the regulators in these areas given our specialist knowledge’, he explains. Alkasab joined Sidra over three years ago after having been in private practice at international law firms in the United States and Qatar. At Sidra, Alkasab’s practice is as diverse as the business of an academic medical centre, with a focus on intellectual property, corporate and commercial, genetic and human subjects research, litigation, and healthcare regulatory work.

Lois Allela’s career path has been, in her own words, ‘interesting’, and undoubtedly set her up incredibly well for her current position as head of legal for Europe, Middle East and East Africa for global interim power solutions provider. ‘My background is in energy law and policy’, she outlines, ‘and prior to this I was in private practice up to court of appeal level as a commercial litigator before I specialised in the oil sector’. From here, she had a stint in the telecoms industry before moving back into the energy sector with Aggreko. Here, she has a very broad brief and deals heavily with Africa alongside her GCC responsibilities, taking advantage of her immense experience of the region gleaned throughout her prior career. Allela has worked on some particularly high-profile projects for Aggreko during her time. ‘We undertake a lot of projects on the events side’, she explains, ‘and doing the Olympics and Winter Olympics was very interesting from a bidding perspective. We just provided on-site power services for the Rio summer and Baku Winter Olympics’, she adds. Allela has improved and enlarged the legal team to a significant extent since joining Aggreko, as she describes: ‘I began with a very small group, and through much hard work and research was able to source and recruit competencies across Eurasia, Russia and the Middle East’ to provide the team with the expertise needed to fulfil their broad responsibilities. ‘It is important that when you are in-house, you have to address your mind towards the business in general, rather than being focused on purely legal work’, Aggreko advises. When putting together her team, these were the qualities that she sought above all others.

Qatar Petroleum is a state owned petroleum company in Qatar that is responsible for all phases of the oil and gas industry in the country. With activities including exploration, production, refining, transport and storage, the company records revenues amounting to approximately 60 percent of Qatar’s GDP and is currently the third largest oil company in the world by oil and gas reserves. Having been the general counsel of the company since August 2007, Mohammed Al-Mannai also serves as a board secretary at Industries Qatar and Gulf International Services. Prior to joining the company, Al-Mannai worked as senior counsel at Qatar Mining. Al-Mannai is one of the most influential lawyers in Qatar and stands out with his expertise in corporate governance, dispute resolution and joint venture transactions.

An Islamic banking specialist, based on both academic attainment in the subject and real-world application of these principles at a senior level, Omar Al-Mudarra is one of the leading financial legal specialists operating in Saudi Arabia. His experience includes spells in the public sector, with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (Committee for the Settlement of Banking Disputes), and in private practice as a senior lawyer at a leading law firm in Saudi Arabia. This culminated in him joining Samba Financial group, one of the premier banking institutions in the country, in July 2011 as head of legal for its investment arm, Samba Capital, where he was responsible for the legal function of investment banking activities. His success and achievements at Samba Capital earned him a promotion to the position of general manager/head of legal at group level for Samba. Al-Mudarra describes how active the role of a senior in-house lawyer can be. ‘It is a widely perceived notion’, he explains, ‘that the in-house lawyer has only one client, which is his organisation, but this is hardly the case because each individual department in the organisation is effectively a client’. The company favours a policy of constant technological improvement in both its service and internal operation, and Al-Mudarra is playing a significant role in the adoption and management of the implantation of new and high-tech improvements to internal processes: ‘Technology has swept across all fields, and law is no exception. The question is not whether Technology will replace most of the Lawyer’s work, but whether we see this as a threat or an opportunity’, Al-Mudarra advises.

Dr Raed Al-Saadouni has amassed over 24 years of legal and business experience at reputable organisations and law firms. Al-Saadouni highlights his first in-house role, as general counsel for Arabian Cement Group between 2002 and 2011, as an important step in his career. ‘This move exposed me to a new industry and opened an important opportunity to work in GCC and Middle East regions rather than just Saudi Arabia’, he recalls. During this period Al-Saadouni planned and directed the legal, compliance, and legal risk management function for the Group and provided legal support on a wide range of commercial transactions including mergers, acquisitions and disposals, shareholders agreements, joint ventures, demergers and corporate restructurings and project financing. Al-Saadouni joined Airbus in 2011, when its defence operation was still known as European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS). He maintained his chief legal officer position for Saudi Arabia when the company rebranded to Airbus in 2014. In 2016, Al-Saadouni was promoted to head of legal and compliance for security solutions when the internal legal and compliance functions were merged. Covering not only the Middle East but Africa too, he has driven Airbus’ business practices to align with the legal and business environments in those areas whilst ensuring the company’s compliance to local laws and regulations. Highlighting the importance of the work carried out, Al-Saadouni says ‘the Middle Eastern countries face serious political and business challenges which at the end affect the legal environment. One of which is the new laws and regulations which re-engineer the business and require companies to change its internal rules in order to fully comply with these new laws and regulations’. Describing how he and his team overcome these challenges, Al-Saadouni says ‘we in Airbus legal make ourselves familiar with these changes, understand their nature and requirements and provide consultation to the management how to change the internal rules in order to comply with these changes’.

In January 2015, Rasha Alsaeed joined global professional services firm company Aon as its general counsel for the Middle East with responsibility for all legal matters related to insurance, re-insurance, HR consultancy, fund saving and risk assessment. In a short space of time she has already made important changes, including drafting the organisation’s consulting, employment and servicing agreements, its memorandum of associations and sale and purchase agreements for transactions within the region. Alsaeed is in charge of Aon Middle East’s M&A activity, providing legal training across the company’s offices in the region, and she works closely with the compliance officer on anti-boycott and anti-bribery rules as well as FCPA. Aon is not the first significant in-house role Alsaeed has been in. She previously excelled as regional general counsel for Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, where she worked on numerous corporate and transactional representative matters and assisted in the process of drafting the UAE’s recent health insurance law. Other notable positions Alsaeed has held include being corporate partner at Al Saeedi Advocates and a lawyer at international law firm Baker Botts between 2006 and 2012. She obtained her Bachelor degree in law from the American University of Sharjah in 2005.

Nasser Al-Taweel’s rapid rise to his current position as chief legal officer and secretary to the board at the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) Authority – preceded by a number of years as in-house counsel with oil supermajor Shell – is highly impressive in its own right; the fact that the QFC Authority is an organisation of such strategic significance to the Qatari government gives even greater prominence to this achievement. As one of the primary state entities working to diversify Qatar’s economy in line with the Qatar National Vision 2030, the QFC Authority manages and controls the affairs of the Qatar Financial Centre – an onshore platform for establishing a wide variety of businesses in the State of Qatar in both the regulated (banks, insurance companies etc.) and non-regulated sectors (consultancy services, legal services, audit services etc.). Al-Taweel describes how he was ‘one of the first Qatari lawyers to qualify as a Solicitor of the Courts of England and Wales’ and quickly put this expertise to work in his role within Shell, where he undertook assignments in Doha, London and The Hague. Having been brought into the executive ranks of the QFC Authority, Al-Taweel has wasted no time in making significant improvements to the internal workings of the legal function. ‘The whole department has been revamped’, he explains, ‘and we have implemented a working method based around being closer to the business and the industry, understanding their needs and focusing on the quality of work produced rather than quantity’. This approach has been very successful, leading to Al-Taweel’s team receiving an industry award as Qatar legal department of the year (small team) in 2016 and going on to win an award for the Middle East legal department of the year (government department, agency or public body) in 2017. In terms of new challenges facing the team, he emphasises that although the QFC is a fully-fledged on-shore business platform that operates within its own independent jurisdiction and under its own laws and regulations (that are primarily based on common law), the QFC Authority also works closely with other state regulators to ensure the operational effectiveness and harmony of the platform within Qatar’s regulatory and business infrastructure. He describes his strategy for this: ‘We position ourselves as partners with other state regulators and always aim to maintain close dialogue with other key stakeholders. We are always prepared to exchange ideas on legal matters in terms that are complimentary and workable. This is vital to getting things done; building trust and rapport is key’. Alongside this, Al-Taweel reinforces his ongoing desire to foster a positive and collaborative atmosphere within the QFC Authority’s legal team: ‘We have a very close working relationship underpinned by approachability, trust and camaraderie. There is mutual respect and understanding at all levels within the team and with senior management, and everyone understands their responsibilities and feels empowered to raise issues and propose solutions’.

Described by peers as a ‘valued advisor’ and ‘superb business leader’, McKinsey’s Nadia Anani has substantial experience of providing high quality legal support with a strong focus on corporate work, projects and financial work practice, as well as advice related to complex litigation. Having received wide praise for her advanced skills in handling matters pertaining to corporate law, dispute resolutions and complex negotiations, Anani has assisted clients from the GCC and MENA countries as well as the USA, Europe, the Far East on a variety of complex matters, such as foreign direct investments, joint ventures agreements, M&A deals, corporate governance work, liquidations and reorganisations. Based in Riyadh, Anani is widely viewed as one of the most reputable in-house professionals in the Middle East and has been praised extensively for her strong expertise in Sharia Law. Having formerly worked in private practice and academia, as well as for over 14 years at the Central Bank of Jordan, Anani has received honours and recognition for supporting the training and integration of women in legal practice in Saudi Arabia.

With an extensive in-house legal career in the oil and gas sector, Olof Arnman brings a wealth of experience to the Eastern Hemisphere activities of Grey Wolf Drilling (Precision Drilling), one of North America’s largest oilfield services companies. In addition to their existing dominance in the United States and Canada, the company has a growing interaction with emerging economies, including those of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and will look to Arnman to utilise his experience and nous to steer the company through any legal and regulatory hurdles it counters. Having proven his capability at the company over a five year period since joining in 2012, Arnman was given the opportunity to undertake a business development role in 2017, in which he is responsible for business development activities in the Eastern Hemisphere. This means he is truly at the forefront of the operations involving emerging markets for the company as it attempts to expand into these new markets. Arnman came to Grey Wolf Drilling (Precision Drilling) after working as a lawyer in oil companies since 2009, including positions in Scotland, Denmark, Doha and Dubai.

Norway-trained lawyer Knut Aksel Asp began his career at ExxonMobil in 2003 as general counsel for the Russian legal division and has since held a number of positions within the company, including being a member of a number of global divisions. In 2007 he transferred to ExxonMobil, United Kingdom as assistant general counsel, holding this position for three years before transferring to the exploration and production Norway headquarters as Nordic public and government affairs director. In September 2016 he assumed his current position as general counsel for ExxonMobil Qatar. Prior to this position he served as attorney at law at Shell Norway and leading Nordic insurance group Gjensidige. Over the years he has amassed a high level of expertise within the energy and oil gas sector, becoming an expert in contract negotiation and strategic communication in offshore drilling projects.

Marie-Therese Auger joined Qatar Cool, the leading commercial provider of district cooling services in the country, in 2011 as the company’s first general counsel. This required Auger to develop the legal team, the operational guidelines and to begin a change in culture for the company: ‘I worked with the board of directors to develop a corporate governance charter as well as board committees’ charters. I started developing internal corporate compliance programs to ensure the company is in compliance with all applicable regulations and follows appropriate procedures. I also started an internal education program to raise legal awareness on common legal issues involved in common practices such as contract review’. Auger also believes that bringing legal advice in-house helped reduce risk for the company due to the tailored element of guidance and the improved understanding of what the advice needed to achieve. The recent dispute between Qatar and the other GCC states has made this immediately accessible advice incredibly important. ‘From a legal perspective, we assessed our position under our ongoing contracts and took some immediate precautionary steps mainly related to procurement. We reviewed the existing contracts and checked the protections offered with focus on the force majeure clauses and other possible remedies to mitigate the risks related to any potential delays’, Auger says. Before joining Qatar Cool, Auger gained extensive experience in corporate legal matters while working with widely known companies across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Her previous academic qualifications include a Diploma of Advanced Studies in International Economic Law, from the University of Paris XIII, and a CAPA certification that admits her to the Paris Bar.

Judeh Bahnan can count upon a wealth of technical legal knowledge gained through a varied and rewarding private practice career to inform his in-house operations. He rose through the ranks of external counsel quickly: in October 2007 Bahnan was a senior associate with SNR Denton and, via a stint with New York-based Dewey & LeBoeuf, by the start of 2014 was going into his second year as an attorney for Patton Boggs (now Squire Patton Boggs). At this point, in January of 2014, he made the move in-house at an extremely prestigious company, Olayan Financing Company (OFC) of Saudi Arabia. OFC is the holding company for the Olayan Group’s sprawling, privately-owned business conglomerate, and has interests in a vast number of industries. Alongside the company’s construction, trading and services portfolio, it is notable as it is the official bottler and distributor of Coca-Cola in Saudi Arabia. Bahnan therefore is required to manage legal affairs in a wide number of jurisdictions and sectors, something that his rapid rise through the private practice ranks will serve him well at.

Nimer Basbous has recently taken on a new role as head of legal for personal banking at First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), a new financial giant born out of the merger of National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) and First Gulf Bank (FGB), where he was previously general counsel. Basbous was provided with a high level of responsibility from early on in his career, which he considers to be a personal career highlight and key to his subsequent success. ‘I started my career as a junior lawyer in the legal department of the Central Bank of Jordan’, he recalls, ‘and about 3 years after joining CBJ, I was appointed as a member of a committee of senior managers to manage a problem bank. My involvement in such a high stakes transaction with very senior members of the CBJ at an early stage of my in-house career had a tremendous positive impact on my understanding of banking, and led to my interest in bankruptcy regimes and resolution models for problem banks’. He has drawn from this experience throughout his career, which has seen him working on a large number of high-value and prominent transactions and projects. None, perhaps, are more complex, valuable and high profile than the role he has played on the successful merger of NBAD and FGB. ‘This project required focused and coordinated efforts by me and my team’, he describes, ‘and in order for this critical activity to succeed, hard work, understanding of the underlying legal issues, and a commercial approach were essential. I would not be exaggerating to say that the work we did was an essential element that led to the success of the merger transaction’. Prior to the merger, Basbous revolutionised the legal function at FGB, displaying his high-calibre managerial and organisational expertise in the setting of a leading financial institution. As well as technical improvements, such as the introduction of new standardised templates and documentation and new and improved framework of policies and process for the management legal risk, he was successful in changing the perception of the legal function at the bank: ‘over my first 3 years at FGB, the legal department became a trusted advisor with early involvement in material projects, products, and transactions. The steps I took to achieve this included hiring and leading a team of highly qualified lawyers, simplification of processes (the benefit of which the business could see and feel), and better communication’. This is an initiative that many in-house counsel have tried and failed to achieve successfully. His interpersonal skills together with his technical abilities and commerciality will undoubtedly pay dividends to the fortunes of FAB for many years to come.

Ulf Bathke recently took on the general counsel role for Industrialization & Energy Services Company (TAQA), a Saudi business operation aimed at developing the industrial capacity of Saudi Arabia, particularly through the adoption of energy solutions for these. Bathke was brought in to create the legal function at TAQA, and goes into the initial actions he undertook to assemble a first-class legal team: ‘The first step here was certainly putting in place rules as to how to deal and manage external legal counsels who had been doing all the legal work at TAQA before I was appointed. I developed a charter for the legal department aimed at structuring the effective provision of legal services to my in-house clients… the feedback I have had thus far is very positive and my colleagues appreciate a structured and obviously more cost effective approach’. While Bathke maintains that ‘there is no one-size-fits-all approach’ to identifying top in-house counsel, he maintains that ‘there are essential characteristics each and every in-house lawyer must bring to the job, such as being highly organised, effectively communicative at all levels and a problem solver rather than a problem creator’. Alongside his corporate legal expertise, Bathke has received praise for his in-depth understanding of Islamic law, especially useful in Saudi Arabia’s business environment, which allows him to successfully liaise with external counsel who are familiar with other legal systems. He mentions cultural understanding as a must for those who wish to make a success outside their home environment: ‘If you work in the Middle East, then it certainly helps a lot if you have made the effort to learn Arabic and become fully familiar with Arab culture. It will make a lot of things easier for you, and opens doors for you which will always remain closed to other foreigners. You should be able to find beauty in a culture which is not your own’, he advises.

Bernadette Baynie is a well-known presence in the Middle Eastern in-house legal community, frequently appearing in various media to provide the benefit of her immense experience to a wider audience. Indeed, she has been enamoured with the mix of business and legal work that in-house roles bring since the early stages of her career, recalling that she ‘thoroughly enjoyed being a lawyer but particularly as an in house counsel’, when first starting out. Having had personnel management responsibilities from a relatively young age, Baynie says she was ‘fortunate that because of my people management abilities I made some amazing relationships’ that have allowed her to draw from a wealth of shared experience throughout her career. This served her particularly well when forming the Batelco Group legal team, where she remains today as group general counsel. ‘When I came to this company ten years ago, I was fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to shape the vision, quality and resources of the team’, she explains, ‘which has been a huge success. It wasn’t a go-to department when I joined, and now it is a department that is in high demand by all business units of the organisation; the company brings us on board during the development of products from the start and the team’s profile has changed from being a service provider to a valued business enabler’, Baynie concludes. She is emphatic when outlining the characteristics that she looks for in her in-house counsel, which she sees as ‘very straightforward: you really need to have a caring and can-do attitude, and make use of the proximity and accessibility you have to your clients in comparison to external lawyers’. Alongside this, she goes on, ‘you have to be empathetic towards everyone around you and look to manage relationships with internal and external clients as a part of one team’. With her legal experience gained both in Australia and the Middle East, she is an ideal person to compare the unique challenges posed by these jurisdictions, and Baynie mentions the positives of both working environments: ‘The valuable relationships that I have built in both locations have been highly rewarding, but working over here in the Middle East means that you don’t have the same level of internal corporate politics and consequential stress that you have back home, which means I have been able to devote my full attention to my work’.

Air Arabia is a low-cost airline operating a fleet of 45 Airbus A320 narrow-body airliners based out of five regional hubs located in the UAE, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan. The company was the first Arab airline to list publically and has posted consistent growth since its inception, due in no small part to the work of their head of legal, Sherif Bishara. Working at private practice before a long spell with Barclays, Bishara moved to the ‘completely new business area’ of Air Arabia in 2010. Since taking over the airline’s legal team, Bishara has strengthened all team members’ legal knowledge via ‘providing in-house training on updated aviation law and improving legal policies and processes, then communicating these efficiency improvements to relevant stakeholders’. One of the main areas of potential cost spirals for airlines is aircraft acquisitions, which can be labour intensive and involve large amounts of capital. As to how to keep costs down here, Bishara looks to provide excellent service delivery within the team: ‘We look to improve accessibility and turnaround times with the customer as much as possible, and to do this I have looked to prepare ‘thorough precedents for all company departments to reduce time taken and increase efficiency’. Alongside this, Bishara is keen to see the in-house legal role increase in prominence throughout the Middle East, and to achieve this, he advises other in-house counsel to ‘understand the nature of business, as the role of an in-house lawyer should be to support the company to achieve its targets’.

Stephen Bodley, chief legal counsel for $2.5bn-revenue Saudi mining company Ma’aden, has made the most of his time in the Middle East. ‘Working in the Middle East has been amazing’, he explains, ‘as while adapting to the business and professional culture was a challenge at first, it was an immensely rewarding experience’. He feels the legal function at the company has been strengthened significantly since joining. ‘The biggest driver of a successful in-house professional function’, he states, ‘is the people’. Bodley, as part of the senior management of the firm, also ensures that there is legal perspective in strategic decisions made by the company at a number of levels, as he explains: ‘The team has a hybrid structure with senior lawyers who are primarily responsible for certain business lines organisational units’. Bodley is clear that a firm legal foundation has played a major part in his success, and suggests other prospective GCs follow this example. ‘I would advise that they get the best training they can early on in their careers. I was very fortunate that I got this specialist training early on which has served me well throughout. Get the best experience you can, and don’t necessarily worry as much about a difference in salary at the start of your career, just focus on improving your skills’, he advises.

With almost a decade spent as Takamul Investment Company’s general counsel, Adrian Brown has been at the company, which is owned by the Oman government, since its incorporation in 2008 and is highly recommended as having ‘high professional standards and broad legal knowledge’ according to one source. Advising on all legal and compliance affairs as well as having responsibility for contract management issues at the Muscat based company, Brown acts in a managerial capacity and sits on several of Takamul’s internal governance bodies including the management committee, management investment committee, HR committee and tender committee, in the latter he assumes the role of Secretary which involves the opening and evaluation of tenders for contracts in several fields. Utilising his knowledge of all applicable risk and market issues as well as a high level of legal expertise accrued throughout his career, Brown is able to show strong leadership and his talent as a business-minded lawyer by delegating, communicating and instructing with a variety of partners inside and external to Takamul. This high-calibre support has allowed the company to put down an impressive market of a committed equity of USD $390m towards developing a sustainable industrial sector in Oman. Having arrived at Takamul with an already impressive amount of experience gained in private practice, Brown previously worked in international law firms across Australia, New Zealand and Oman including MinterEllisonRuddWatts, Henry Davis York and Al Busaidi Mansoor Jamal & Co.

During his four-year tenure at Orpic, Oman’s national refining and petrochemical company, Lorenzo Bruttomesso has built, developed and expanded the legal and compliance function from the ground up, enabling the unit to keep pace with Orpic’s growth. As a result of this achievement, Bruttomesso has received wide praise internally: ‘Towards the end of last year, I sent a survey to Orpic’s business and technical functions and I was pleased with the manner in and response from Orpic. The legal and compliance team were acknowledged as adding value to the operations of Orpic, being professional in its approach, attaining the required level of standard of quality in the work produced and achieving the level of response times required for an evolving and growing organisation.’ While impressing with his organisational skills, Bruttomesso’s transactional expertise has also been highly notable. During the last five years, he has played an instrumental role in supporting important corporate project for Orpic, such as Sohar Refinery Improvement Project (SRIP), Muscat Sohar Product Pipeline Project (MSPP), the Liwa Plastics Integrated Complex Project (LPIC) and their corresponding project financing. His negotiations on the SRIP EPC contract were particularly challenging. ‘It was an intense affair and concluded after long hours of discussion in the early hours of a Friday morning’, Bruttomesso says. ‘The negotiation of the concomitant finance document was just as intense, and concluded after weeks of long hours of discussions with multiple ECAs and a club of lenders. These negotiations represent a concrete example of hard work, persistence and team effort – with the assistance of professional external financial and legal advisors – that are the recipe for a successful transaction for Orpic. The MSPP and LPIC transactions that followed were clones of this successful recipe and equally successful.’

Operating in 70 countries, French utility company ENGIE earned over €66.6bn in 2016 from its three core business, namely electricity, natural gas and energy services. Currently general counsel for the MESCAT region, Catherine Chouteau has had an association of over 20 years with the company and its previous incarnations. Her journey started in 1994 in Paris at Suez Environment, ENGIE’s water treatment and waste management subsidiary. She spent seven years there as legal counsel before working in the Paris office of law firm Baker McKenzie as a senior associate working on project finance and banking matters for almost two years. Staying in Paris, Chouteau joined Gaz de France (now ENGIE) in 2003, where she was senior legal counsel for three years before being promoted to the head of the legal department for the company’s international division. When Gaz de France merged with Suez in 2008, Chouteau was made general counsel for GDF Suez’s European energy business and remained in the position for over three years until 2011. Chouteau held one more position for the company in Paris; she was deputy general counsel for its energy services business between 2011 and 2013. 2014 was an important year in Chouteau’s career as she made the move to Dubai to take the position of general counsel for GDF Suez’s MESCAT region. Chouteau’s appointment came as no surprise given she had shone in various senior positions within the company and accumulated a wealth of knowledge and understanding of its businesses during her long association with it.

Andrew Cooke welcomes the varied nature of his role as general counsel of FLASH Entertainment, the region’s premier live events company. Indeed, he recalls being thrown in at the deep end from the start. ‘In December 2011, when I was less than six months into the job, we delivered a two-day dance music festival, an international tennis tournament, a Sade concert at one venue and a Coldplay concert at another (which we built on a beach in three weeks)’. Despite the demanding schedule, Cooke’s extensive legal groundwork made the difference during this busy month. ‘The new processes I’d implemented on joining held up’, he explains: ‘The business needs were met, we maintained a phenomenal turnaround time and tracked everything using a metrics programme. Even to this day, we use that month as a case study to showcase our delivery capabilities.’ Among other career highlights, he cites being part of the team that saw Flash Entertainment win bids to deliver the FIFA Club World Cup UAE 2017/18 and the AFC Asian Cup UAE 2019. FLASH is known for delivering un-missable events and these achievements ‘place FLASH in the top-tier of sports delivery agencies in the world’. Cooke is also proud of his role as mentor to fellow members of the FLASH Entertainment legal team, some of whom have gone on to win recognition and awards within the industry. Cooke prizes a data-led and process-focused approach to legal service delivery. ‘In my first 18 months, I invested a lot of time in volume management and tracking’, he recalls. ‘We saw a return on that investment very quickly, as the business’ basic legal needs were being met in a predictable way. Six years on, the overall impact of our approach has been to democratise what we do: the team understands our supply chain, and where we are best placed in theirs. We’re part of the ecosystem.’ As for how to build an effective legal team, Cooke has studied extensively how leadership and engagement affect team performance, and is a regular author and speaker on the subject. ‘As the American leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith puts it, we all need to recognise the difference between achievements that happen because of what we do, and achievements that happen despite what we do. An example of this: senior staff assuming they are strong leaders because junior staff follow their instructions. This could be evidence of strong leadership, but it could also be evidence of leveraging hierarchy. It’s incumbent on all of us to understand the difference between the two and how it might affect our ability to create ethical, engaged, innovative teams’.

The Kuwait headquartered Agility is one of the world’s leading providers of integrated logistics with more than 22,000 employees in over 500 offices and 100 countries. The company operates a fleet of trucks and other vehicles that enable it to provide timely distribution within the UAE and abroad. Its 104,500 m2 operation includes ambient, chilled, pharma-grade and frozen storage. A proven specialist in commercial litigation, Zeina Abi-Chahine Craven has progressed rapidly within the legal department, initially starting as senior legal counsel based in Kuwait. In just over two years, she was promoted to the position of chief compliance officer of the company and in another two years to general counsel. Currently based in the United Arab Emirates, Abi-Chahine Craven orchestrates the legal affairs of Agility in the entire Middle East and Africa Region. Prior to initiating her in-house legal career, she worked at the law firm Nabil Abdel Malek.

John Davidson moved to Dubai in 2006, after gaining five years of private practice experience at Osler, one of Canada’s largest law firms. Davidson worked as an in-house lawyer at CA Technologies, before joining his present employer Nakheel Properties, initially as senior legal counsel within the company’s retail business unit and subsequently as general counsel of the group’s entire legal function. Having completed a number of key transactions, Davidson stands out for his impressive work on Nakheel’s $16 billion restructuring. ‘As far as I am aware, this is the largest single restructuring ever completed in the region,’ he says. ‘It was an important transaction on many levels because of the innovative approach to different issues and because of the critical importance of the successful completion of the restructuring to Dubai overall in light of Nakheel’s significant role in the Dubai economy.’ Davidson also steered Nakheel through the weight of a string of litigations against the company, which amounted to several billion dollars. ‘Nakheel had never faced litigation like this before and we had to gear up quickly to address these cases since the company’s future financial viability would have been at risk had significant losses in these cases occurred. In particular, we were very successful in defending numerous unfounded claims by purchasers in the company’s The World islands project. We were responsible for setting much of the precedent in the English language branch of the Emirate’s courts.’ From a functional perspective, Davidson was involved in the centralisation of the company’s legal department at its head office and the cross-training of lawyers across various areas of work. These changes resulted in greater visibility and oversight of the legal work, as well as the opportunity for the team to get experience across a broader range of issues. When asked about the local in-house market, Davidson articulates: ‘Practising law in-house in Dubai is interesting and can be rewarding because of the scale of the projects and the variety of the work but can be extremely challenging and requires careful attention to detail and a good understanding of the commercial issues (as well as legal) since agreements that are negotiated often come up for review and are rarely “left in the drawer” like in many more established markets.’

Dr Pascal Dutru, general counsel of Qatar Communications, is one of the leading telecoms professionals in the entire Middle East. He brings with him a wealth of experience operating at the highest levels of the telecommunications industry in France, including over twelve years with Bouyges Telecom and a period as group general counsel of international media company Clear Channel France. From this enviable telecoms base (which provided ‘an in-depth understanding of markets at all stages of competition and the deployment of proactive strategies tailored to foster their growth’), he made the move to Qatar Communications and Regulatory Authority in 2012, where he has been ever since. He has had an immense effect on the organisation as a whole, and ‘has held various senior manager positions ranging from strategy, policy, planning and legal’ during the course of his tenure, testament to his immense experience across a broad range of disciplines including senior management. Dutru has worked closely with the Minister of Information and Communications Technology during his time with Qatar Communications Regulatory Authority, and has managed the regulatory strategy and policy department. This has given him an appreciable impact as to how legislation relating to communications in Qatar has developed over the past few years, and his work will continue to inform this area for many years to come.

Anwar El Khatib is a lawyer with over 21 years’ experience in both private practice and in-house environments, which has given him a ‘diversified and strong knowledge in litigation, consultancy and corporate affairs.’ Since joining Oman Insurance Company, one of UAE’s leading financial institutions, El Khatib has been overseeing all legal and transactional affairs and litigations of the company. His arrival at the company in 2012 has been accompanied by significant operational improvements to the structure of the department, as well as changes in its role within the wider company: ‘I gave the legal department another perspective, with legal becoming an important part of the commercial and strategic business decision of the organization’, El Khatib explains. In addition to navigating all legal, compliance and corporate affairs, Anwar has also contributed to the function’s expansion, limiting the amount of work outsourced to external advisors. Of note has also been his effort to lead joint ventures and acquisitions in Turkey and Iraq. During his previous role at the real estate finance provider Tamweel, El Khatib established a revolutionary process for enabling Sharia- compliant documents to be enforceable in constitutional courts between 2009 and 2010. A year earlier, upon joining the company at the height of the global financial crisis, El Khatib established Tamweel’s entire legal fraction from scratch, whilst operating with minimal resources.

Having joined Amec Foster Wheeler in October 2013, prior to which he was general counsel (MENAT) for GE, Mohamed el Roubi has recently taken on global responsibilities for legal support to the company’s operations across its four business lines, reporting directly to the group general counsel in the United Kingdom. He recalls his significant and successful role in the integration of AMEC and Foster Wheeler’s legal teams: ‘As we acquired FW and integrated a large team of FW lawyers, I aimed to create a consistent model for legal service delivery while maintaining an efficient and lean team, leveraging the incredible talents and common values of the lawyers’. In terms of how el Roubi interacts with the executive management of the business, he is clear that they collaborate extensively and that he shares a ‘fantastic working relationship with the CEO, group GC, senior functional leaders and members of the exec committee’. El Roubi ascribes this excellent partnership to the mutual trust that develops from working on complex matters in a difficult market, and being ‘recognised for being rigorous and robust in my approach to issues management: I don’t just look at the legal side, and always try to look beyond the strict confines of the legal role as much as possible’. He believes all in-house counsel should adopt this approach. ‘One of the worst things a lawyer can do’ he advises, ‘is stay in their box, or accept something isn’t a concern for them because it’s not a legal issue – you are a stakeholder in the business, and should have an opinion on business issues’. El Roubi would like to see greater recognition of the value that this delivers to a business: ‘Hopefully, before too long the view that lawyers should not have an opinion on business matters will no longer be prevalent.’

SaudiGulf Airlines is the third domestic Saudi airline in operation, after Saudia and budget carrier flynas. Aiming to occupy a gap in the market in the airline industry in Saudi Arabia, SaudiGulf began operations in October 2016 using an initial fleet of four brand-new Airbus A320 aircraft, with a further 24 Bombardier CS300 jets to add to its narrow-body, short-range fleet. Ayman El Mahmoudy, general counsel of SaudiGulf, is an aviation legal expert and boasts spells with EgyptAir, Air Cairo and the Egyptian Minister of Aviation throughout his 26-year career. During this, he has been involved in startup airlines, joint ventures, litigation and internal investigations to name a few areas; this experience marks him out as one of the foremost aviation lawyers operating in the Middle East currently. SaudiGulf has ambitious growth plans and looks set to expand significantly over the next few years, with plans in place to order a number of very large and expensive wide-body jets to enhance their international carrying capacity.

Ismael Elnasri is a seasoned legal and compliance professional with over 15 years’ experience working in the investment and commercial banking industry. Praised for his understanding of Bahrain’s financial services sector, Elnasri possesses solid expertise in capital markets, Islamic products and union negotiations. A qualified associate member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb-UK), Elnasri has held prominent positions at leading Middle Eastern banks Investors Bank and Alubaf Arab International Bank, and since 2017 has led the legal department of Inovest, a Bahrain- based investment company. In his relatively short tenure at the company, Elnasri has already significantly strengthened communication lines between Inovest’s legal department and the rest of the company. This was achieved largely thanks to Elnasri’s work to establish procedures for the management of legal services and matters, as well as his efforts to clearly define to senior management the scope of legal services provided by the legal department, the responsibilities for consultants involved in the provision of legal services and the responsibilities of employees within Inovest in relation to accessing legal services.

The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) is the organisation tasked with investing Qatar’s significant sovereign wealth fund, and possesses the ambitious goal of removing Qatar’s reliance on their hydrocarbon reserves for its economic security over the next few decades. Ehab Elsonbaty is QIA’s senior legal counsel and head of governance and government affairs, a role which he is highly suited for given his vast experience operating at the highest levels of the legal profession. During his career, he has worked at a high level in private practice, become senior judge of the court of appeal in Egypt, and was also employed as senior legal advisor to His Royal Highness the Amir of the State of Qatar Office Amiri Diwan (Royal Court); his ability to manage projects of the utmost importance and deal with the associated pressures that these bring is therefore not in doubt. Indeed, Elsonbaty maintains that the variety of legal work that his career has afforded him is what he is most fond of when looking back on his career so far. ‘I suppose the idea that during my career I did almost all legal jobs available is something I am very proud of’, he recalls. ‘That, and also the fact that in QIA I contribute to most of the important deals, which is challenging in such a huge organisation’, he continues, going on to say he is ‘very glad to have contributed to many of the important laws and regulation in Qatar for the last eight years’. On dealing with external factors that can affect the fortunes of the organisation, Elsonbaty is clear on his strategy of leaving nothing to chance. ‘Take any new developments to the business and legal world with complete seriousness, and do a comprehensive study on whatever risks are there or may materialise’. He states the QIA legal function’s aim is to ‘never be in a situation where we are shocked by an issue arising that we do not expect’. Overall, he concludes, ‘we understand that we have to remain alive as a market, and even if something is not to our benefit we have to deal with it and move forward’.

Hikma Pharmaceuticals is a Jordanian-headquartered multinational pharmaceutical company that manufactures both branded and non-branded pharmaceutical products for a wide range of markets. Zeid El-Uteibi is the head of legal for Hikma’s MENA region, which encompasses all of the company’s activities in the Middle East and North Africa region including two manufacturing centres in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, each of which are approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration. Tailoring legal advice to the company to enable it to release its products in a compliant manner, El-Uteibi’s expertise extends to the management of several cross-border deals and the coordination of outside counsel to ensure the best possible outcomes for Hikma in its home region.

Qatar First Bank is a Doha headquartered bank and one of the first Shari’ah compliant financial institution regulated by the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority. Formed in 2009, the bank offers investment opportunities and innovative financial solutions with local, regional and international reach. Having joined the bank in 2016, Toufic Abi Fadel bosts over 22 years of experience in the legal arena. As general counsel and corporate secretary, Abi Fadel navigates the bank’s legal matters and provides strategic advice and counsel to the senior management and board members. Previously, Abi Fadel was the general counsel at Qatar Development Bank, a fully owned government entity dedicated to supporting small and medium sized enterprises (SME) in the country. Before that, for over a decade Abi Fadel was a partner at one of the leading international law firms in France Gide Loyrette Nouel.

In 2014 Nebras Power – a joint venture between Qatar Electricity and Water Company, Qatar Petroleum International, and Qatar Holding – was established to invest in large-scale power and water projects around the world. The company has focused on generating complete solutions for new projects such as LNG handling facilities, water treatment plants, and fuel sourcing and supply ventures – these span across the MENA region and increasingly into South East Asia and Europe. Marco Faldella joined Nebras Power as general counsel in 2016, in response to the continuing growth of the company’s operations and geographical spread. Faldella had not long joined the company when he began to work on its further international expansion. In January 2017, Nebras Power agreed to acquire a 35.5% stake of PT Paiton Energy, Indonesia’s largest independent power provider. This purchase – from international energy company ENGIE – was one of the largest M&A deals in the market in recent times, and will see Nebras Power take on more than 2,000MW of installed capacity, which represents 4% of the total capacity in Indonesia. Faldella quarterbacked this transaction from Doha, with the help of external counsel on the ground in Jakarta. Before moving to Doha to join Nebras Power, Faldella spent four years as senior legal counsel at TAQA, the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, managing legal matters for the Emirate’s flagship company. His initial experience of in-house legal (Veroniki Holding) and private practice (Bonelli Erede Pappalardo; Allen & Overy) were in Italy.

Alexandre Fathay has amassed almost 20 years of in-house experience in senior positions. Originally from France, Fathay’s in-house journey began at France Telecom where he served as corporate counsel in Paris for five years from 1999 to 2004. He was then recruited by Compass Group, the UK-headquartered leading food and support services company, to be their general counsel for Central Asia, Middle East and Africa. During his time at Compass Group, Fathay earned a reputation of being highly skilled in handling matters concerning corporate law, joint ventures, intellectual property and dispute resolution among others. Because of his skills, in 2009 Fathay was hired by ENOC, a leading integrated global oil and gas player which earned over $14bn in 2015 and is wholly owned by the government of Dubai. As ENOC’s general counsel since 2009, Fathay has been involved in a number of significant transactions for the company. In 2015 he was worked on the landmark acquisition worth £3.7bn of a 46% non-controlling interest in Dragon Oil as well as the purchase of a lube blending facility in Jebel Ali for ENOC Lubricants & Greases Manufacturing Plant (ELOMP). The following year ENOC announced a $1bn expansion project for its Jebel Ali Refinery and Fathay has been involved in a number of activities related to the investment such as the awarding a contract to Rotary Engineering of Fujairah to build the twelve storage tanks to help the company increase its refinery capacity by 50% to accommodate Dubai’s growing population and energy demands. Fathay obtained his Master of Laws from the University of Dijon in France in 1994.

Markus Federle places his decision to make the transition to in-house legal work as among his career highlights. Indeed, it was a momentous decision to leave behind a hugely successful private practice career (one that saw him make partner at Norton Rose and Dewey Ballantine at an early age, as well as head of private equity for Germany at the latter) for a start-up investment management firm. As to why he made this move, Federle maintains that ‘it is perhaps part of my personality that I have this entrepreneurial drive… making the switch from being a lawyer at a global firm to being an entrepreneur was a big one, but one through which I felt I was answering a true calling’. At the start-up firm Federle and his partners quickly made excellent progress, raising and investing over $500m in two funds until the financial crisis forced the firm’s expansion to be checked, a period that Federle recalls as an important confirmation of the relevance of his role as a lawyer: ‘Lawyers are notorious for always thinking in terms of worst case scenarios, and this was an example of one happening. There are a lot of smart people in the investment world, but ultimately you cannot outsmart radical market events; as a lawyer and as a business owner this made me a little more humble, skeptical and careful and has made legal protection in downside scenarios a continued focus of my work’. After spending over four years with The Fairsky Group, the alternative investment advisory firm he had previously co-founded, Federle missed ‘the transactional side of things’ and in May 2013 joined the principal investment group Samena Capital as a senior managing director in Dubai from where he advises on investment activities throughout Asia and oversees legal and compliance in the firm’s other offices in London, Mumbai and Hong Kong. Moving to the Middle East is another career highlight of his, particularly the fact that ‘successfully adapting to new jurisdictions that have completely different cultures is a must’. For instance, he explains that he ‘just worked on a transaction in Myanmar, one of the first significant private equity deals there… but that’s the exciting thing about the job: there is always something new to learn and new people that you come across’. As a GC, Federle is adamant that while it is ‘important to be cordial and able to deal with people’, it is just as important to ‘speak up and raise any concerns for the business you may have: you have to be courageous enough to do so... identifying, measuring and managing legal risks is the very core of the role’.

Distinguished International lawyer Diego Felix joined Mubadala Petroleum in 2012 as legal counsel, and was shortly promoted to senior legal counsel. Through his proven dedication and 15 years of experience in the global gas and oil sector, Felix moved up the banks to his current position as general counsel in 2016. Prior to joining Mubadala Petroleum, Felix worked at Qatar International Petroleum Marketing Company (Tasweeq) in Qatar and Occidental exploration and production company in Ecuador. He is qualified to practise law in Ecuador and California, USA. Felix received his law degree from Pontificia Universida Católica del Ecuador and holds a Masters of Laws from Harvard Law school, USA.

Vivek Gambhir is no less than an expert in international energy law. Much of his experience was gained during 12 years as a partner for law firm CMS Cameron McKenna in the UK. In this role Gambhir acted for some of the world’s best-known energy companies on international power matters that covered the UK, India and Hong Kong. This wealth of experience was the perfect foundation for his May 2011 move into an in-house legal role with TAQA, the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Energy Company. Initially founded in 2005, TAQA had a 2016 revenue of AED 16bn and employed circa 2,700 individuals to operate its oil, gas, water and power facilities across 11 countries in Europe, Middle East, North Africa, North America and India. Gambhir joined TAQA at a time when the business was continuing to expand its operations geographically, as well as seeking to align with Abu Dhabi’s Economic Vision 2030 – which has aimed to maintain the Emirate’s posterity whilst diversifying the economy. Gambhir’s ability to advise TAQA on legal and commercial matters has seen him progress from deputy general counsel (May 2011), to acting general counsel (October 2015), and then eventually earning promotion to overall general counsel (May 2017). In his GC role Gambhir helps TAQA contend with its corporate debt portfolio, exposure to commodity price volatility and general operational risk associated with the sectors and countries that it operates in. This is a considerable task given that TAQA has investments in power generation, water desalination, oil and gas exploration and production, pipelines and gas storage in countries as diverse in regulation as Canada, Ghana, India, Iraq, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Netherlands, United Kingdom and United States. Gambhir recently advised TAQA during the commencement of oil production at its Atrush Block in the Kurdistan region of Iraq – considering the history of the country, and the importance the company, this was a project that had to executed with precision and exceptional due diligence.

Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company is an investment arm of the Kingdom of Bahrain, with the stated goal of managing and expanding an ever expanding portfolio of diverse assets internationally. Rima Al Masri, general counsel and corporate secretary of the group, takes pride in her role in supporting an organisation that aims to secure the future financial stability of Bahrain. She speaks of the changing internal legal apparatus of Bahrain Mumtalakat during her time there: ‘Mumtalakat has evolved considerably over the last four years, and we went from a company that was managing its legacy assets and restructuring them for better performance to an investment company that was actively investing internationally, to grow its portfolio and improve its profits. This in turn, required the dynamics and expertise of the legal team to change, so we expanded the team ensuring the appropriate expertise was available’. With the new legal procedures in place and the team operating at maximum efficiency, Al Masri is confident in the abilities of Mumtalakat to weather any storm that might arise externally. ‘Regardless of any economic or political factors that may impact one’s business’, she explains, ’a company with sound governance, appropriate business practices and proactive forward looking management will always endure any challenges with success. Mumtalakat has certainly been tried and tested in this and has come out a cut above the rest’. This is in no small part to the close cooperation between Al Masri, her team and senior management of the business. Al Masri explains that this is a relationship that she has cultivated over time: ‘I am proud to say that I have built a strong relationship with the CEO and members of senior management. It is imperative for a general counsel to gain the trust and respect of executive and senior management, if they are to lead an effective legal team that plays an operational role in the company and is not merely a last stop to meet a requirement. It is due to the trust and faith between the CEO, senior management and the legal team that we are able to ensure that Mumtalakat meets the requirements of stakeholders and is a respected and leading entity in its field without ever compromising its legal position’.

It is fair to say that Oliver Hallsworth has had a unique career for an in-house lawyer – his experience spans from the UK Bar, to investment banking in Jersey, to commercial banking in the Middle East. Even after qualifying as a barrister with Lincoln’s Inn in UK, Hallsworth quickly realised that the fast-paced world of investment banking was where he wanted to start his career. After in-house legal roles at Citibank (2000-2002), Lehman Brothers (2002-2005) and UBS (2005-2012), he made the significant change of moving to Qatar to take up the mantle of senior legal counsel at Al Khalij Commercial Bank – a next generation bank offering products to business, corporate and international clients in Qatar, UAE and France. Making this move was definitely beneficial to Hallsworth, adding to his existing expertise as well as generating new skills that would be essential in the different business environments across the Middle East. He says that his initial period at Al Khalij involved ‘learning and understanding the way in which business is done in the Middle East, which is very different approach to the European one. You have to expect a top down approach and be prepared to share your views and spend time in building a long lasting relationship with your manager’. There was also the difference in the speed of regulatory change – described as a ‘slow burn’ – to contend with. Regardless of the differences, Hallsworth has excelled in his Middle Eastern career, and in August 2016 he became managing director at ADS Securities, the Middle East’s leading forex brokerage. This role, based out of Abu Dhabi, sees him manage all legal, commercial, regulatory, compliance and brand protection matters for ADS. Hallsworth’s career can be defined by its international scope, as well as the number of landmark successes he has stimulated along the way, but his self-selected career highlights are ones that many would consider high-pressured and stressful – but this is an environment that he thrives in. In his top three moment in his career so far he includes working on the Wembley Stadium financing as a junior lawyer, overseeing the ‘structuring and financing by a syndicate of a US$1bn sale and lease back of 9 Boeing 777s for an ambitious regional airline in 2015’, and ‘managing… a FATCA US Department of Justice audit in conjunction with their forensic KPMG audit team and obtaining a clean bill of health’. Considering his ceaseless ability to innovate and his gift for applying legal knowledge for commercial gain, Hallsworth has featured in the GC Powerlist: Middle East for three consecutive years.

Listed on the Dubai Financial Market and boasting 2016 revenues of over $4.3bn, Emaar Properties is the largest and most prominent real estate developer in the UAE. Among other projects, it is the guiding force behind perhaps the most internationally-recognised symbol of the UAE globally, the Burj Khalifa. Alongside this tower (the tallest in the world), Emaar Properties has also developed the Dubai Mall and the Dubai Fountain, both the largest examples of their type globally; these projects give an understanding of the general scale of Emaar’s developments. Ayman Hamdy, general counsel, oversees legal matters for these significant undertakings and brings unparalleled experience of the company’s operations to the role. He has been involved with the company since 2006, and has therefore been at the forefront of the legal support for the eye-catching megaprojects that have transformed the city centre of Dubai. Prior to his role with Emaar, Hamdy was a partner with Shalakany Law Office and served as group legal counsel for Unilever Arabia.

Clinton Hermes moved into the field of healthcare legal work soon after finishing his academic qualifications. ‘After I graduated from Harvard Law School, I went into a large firm practicing healthcare law, representing hospitals and universities. Eventually I ended up going in-house as general counsel of one of my clients, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I was there for seven years when I got a call from a headhunter about the Sidra opening, whom I joined in 2013’. Hermes is keen to point out that one of the main satisfactions he has derived from his career has been the opportunity to build the team members around him and nurture their talents. ‘The highlights that first occurs to me’, he recalls, ‘have to do with the success of my team members. For example, I am proud that the person I hired as associate general counsel at St. Jude ultimately got confirmed by the CEO and Board as my successor, and she is doing a great job’. Since moving to Sidra, Hermes has managed to enact a number of improvements to the way the legal function is run there. ‘I am Sidra’s first general counsel, so I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to shape the legal department and others’ perception of it. We have focused on having a few excellent senior attorneys who can provide great client service and mentorship for our recent Qatari graduates’. Hermes is a proud exponent of the unique benefits and challenges that in-house work brings, and outlines this for other legal professionals. ‘Enjoy the differences between in-house and law firm practice’, he advises, ’but these differences are less about quality of life and more about the chance to learn an organisation and work with non-lawyers. You have to learn to make your skill set relevant to a discussion even when legal considerations are not paramount, or not even present.’

Arab Bank for Investment & Foreign Trade (Al Masraf) traces its history back to 1975, when it was formed with the goal of promoting cooperation in financial matters between Arab states. Consequently, to this day its ownership is shared between the Federal Government of the UAE, the Libyan Foreign Bank and La Banque Exterieure d’Algerie. As well as consumer and corporate banking and investment services, the bank offers Islamic financial products that are fully sharia-compliant. Razi Heyasat is head of legal and board secretary for this illustrious institution and boasts a wealth of experience of the bank, having been employed with them as a legal counsel from 2008. This almost decade-long experience with Al Masraf means he knows the bank’s products and services intimately, and his accession to the role of head of legal in 2015 provides the bank with an experienced and hugely knowledgeable head of legal who also contributes to strategic decision making at the company.

General counsel of Credit Suisse Dubai for over 13 years, Mohammed Hijazi manages the legal and compliance department for CS offices in the Middle East and Africa region, including operations in the Dubai International Financial Centre within Saudi Arabia, Doha, Bahrain, Egypt and Lebanon. Prior to this role, Hijazi served as senior legal advisor for HSBC for four years as part of the Middle East and Africa Management office. In this capacity he provided legal support for all legal banking activities. Over the years Hijazi has accrued specialisms in the areas of capital markets and banking law making him a highly respected general counsel in the region. Most recently the bank has been the financial advisor to Omantel buying 10 percent of Kuwait’s Zain Group for $846.1m. Along with external counsel Hijazi has advised and supported this acquisition, contributing to Omantel’s strategy to diversify its exposure. Hijazi is also part of Credit Suisse’s audit committee and assists the board of directors in fulfilling its oversight responsibilities defined by law and internal regulations. In this role Hijazi reviews legal and compliance topics, manages legal entity financials and reviews the divisional business strategy for the legal function.

An expert in JVs, corporate, commercial and companies’ laws, franchise agreements and compliance matters, Mona Hussein has operated in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait during the course of her career. She is currently heading the legal and compliance function at adidas Emerging Markets – a region that includes MENA, Africa, Turkey and India. She joined adidas in 2013 to set up the legal and compliance function, build a highly driven self-motivated team and a compliance oriented environment. As a trusted member of the senior management team, her daily job consists of providing strategic legal advice to management, drafting and ensuring the implementation of internal governance policies, mitigating internal and external risks, keeping abreast with new legislations and regional and international sanctions, setting up subsidiaries and the E-commerce business for the region. With her ability to ‘see around the corner’, Hussein is highly regarded for her risk mitigation abilities, ensuring she is a guardian of the business at all times. Prior to joining adidas, she worked at a major multi-functional group of companies, Majid Al Futtaim – Dubai, managing the joint venture side of the business which included retail, fashion, IT contracts, leisure and entertainment, financial facilities and a credit card joint venture company. Hussein later moved on to join one of the most prominent local law firms in the UAE, Hadef & Partners - Abu Dhabi, as a litigator, representing clients in multi-million dollar cases filed before the courts of the UAE. Having worked with different types of businesses throughout the region she has developed great business acumen which has endowed her with a vast legal portfolio and a highly responsible corporate code; there are no two ways about her ethics and integrity, with her zero tolerance policy for non-compliance a clear sign of this. In her role, she trains the organisations across the region on compliance matters including fraud, bribery and corruption, competition law and acting in compliance with the company code of conduct. Hussein is keen to contribute her knowledge to the wider in-house and general counsel community and has made appearances at roundtables and speaking engagements aimed at furthering the expertise of in-house counsel in MENA and was elected last year as a judge for the Middle East Legal Awards.

A hugely experienced lawyer, Siddig Hussein has spent time in academic, private practice, legislative and in-house legal roles. As such, he contributes a wealth of experience to Al Rajhi Bank’s collective knowledge-base, and has done so since he joined them over a decade ago in February 2007. He is chief legal advisor to the bank with responsibility for providing legal frameworks and compliance and regulatory procedures for corporate, retail and projects finance both domestically and abroad. Hussein is ideally-placed to formulate the bank’s response to new regulations and compliance norms, having first-hand governmental experience at the UAE Ministry of Labour. Here, he was engaged in ensuring compliance of UAE labour law within the country, and thus has experience in drafting regulations that companies must follow. During this period, Hussein also represented the UAE in free trade area negotiations with other major international actors.

Ahmad Zaky Ismail amasses over 24 years as an accomplished general counsel within the private and public sector, specialising in strategic regulatory management, corporate governance, mergers & acquisitions and pre and post M&A integration. Assuming his current position in June 2016, as the general counsel for Saudi Aramco Shell Refinery Company (SASREF) Ismail is responsible for the company’s legal and regulatory compliance to all legal matters. Prior to this role he served as the legal advisor for the Information & E-Government Authority Kingdom of Bahrain (iGA) for five years. In this capacity he ensured that iGA complied with all the laws of the Kingdom of Bahrain, later becoming appointed as the board legal advisor to SILAH Gulf WLL, which was a joint venture company between iGA and merchants based in the United Kingdom. Previously located in Malaysia, Ismail had a stint in a number of Malaysian-based companies, one of which was British American Tobacco between 1999 and 2000 as company secretary and general counsel, and another was at Maxis Communications over a period of eight years.

Gulf Steel Works is a steel fabrication company that undertakes projects for leading companies, such as Saudi Aramco, Sabic and Maaden in addition to international EPC contractors. Since joining the company in February 2015, general counsel Eyad Jaber has introduced fundamental improvements to the operations of the legal department. Apart from, instituting new guidelines in the administration of labour issues, in order to mitigate labour disputes within the guidelines of Saudi labour law, Jaber has also worked proactively with the contract management and project management departments to keep a record on the progress of all existing records and to enable a response to all contractual correspondence without delays. ‘These improvements have helped the company to maintain current information on all projects and report the situation in a timely manner to the company’s senior management,’ Jaber says. The clear gains in efficiency resulting from Jaber’s contribution have been particularly useful to Gulf Steel Works, as the company has to deal with ever increasing competition and political situation in the Middle East. Prior to joining Gulf Steel Works, Jaber worked for highly respected regional law firms.

Bank Audi is Lebanon’s largest bank in terms of customer deposits and total assets. The bank offers universal financial products and services including corporate and commercial, retail and private banking in addition to investment banking and factoring. Since joining the group in June 2007, Chahdan E. Jebeyli has transformed the internal legal function. In addition to putting in place coherent and skilled teams across the group, he forged a strong linked between the legal and compliance resources in both the head office and group entities. One of the most experienced financial sector in-house lawyers in Lebanon and the Middle East, Jebeyli receives praise for his expertise in banking corporate governance and anti-money laundering regulation, as well as for his outstanding support of the group’s business activities and strategic objectives both locally and globally. He moved to Bank Audi from Citibank, where he served as a managing director of legal and compliance for the MENA region. Before Citibank, he worked as a private practice professional in the USA with a focus on commercial and banking matters.

Shaun Johnson has practiced as a lawyer for 18 years, one third of which was in private practice at Ashurst in Melbourne, Australia and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, which provided him with a comprehensive technical legal base. For the last twelve years, he has undertaken purely in-house work with a mix of private and public sector organisations, and took up his current role as general counsel for the PPP Unit for Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Holding in February 2016. ‘When I came into the role’, he recalls, ’it was not just a new job – it was a new country and an entirely new region, which meant I had to leave at the door any preconceived notions of firms or professional relationships I had developed across my career up to that point. However’, he goes on, ‘this turned into a positive because it meant I had to invest time in cultivating new relationships from almost zero and, as a consequence, I have been able to introduce some of the things I have learnt over my career and apply them in my current role’. He sees this as a long-term investment: ‘Ultimately, where I would like to get to with our external legal advisors is simple: I want them to become our trusted advisors and in turn, we want to be their client of choice’. Johnson is clear about the advice he would give to someone looking to cultivate a world-beating in-house legal team. ‘Firstly’, he begins, ‘be accessible and make sure the legal team sits in close proximity to the business as you can never underestimate how much this integration helps in understanding your internal stakeholders’ needs and objectives. Secondly’, Johnson continues, ‘keep learning from others’. He goes on to explain how a conversation, an article, or a formal mentor can spark ideas on how you may be able to improve yourself and the team. ‘Finally’, he concludes, ‘strategise! The legal function can get pulled in many different directions as it is asked to deal with short-to-medium term issues so it is critical to take stock of where the team are now, where it should ideally be, and work out the steps needed to take it there. Doing this regularly can ensure your direction of travel is the right one. After all’, he notes, ‘your company is always changing and responding to internal and external factors, so why shouldn’t you?’

Zahid Kamal leads the three-member legal team at Fajr Capital, a Dubai-based private equity investor whose shareholders include sovereign investors from Abu Dhabi, Brunei Darussalam, and Malaysia, as well as private institutions from the GCC and beyond. Kamal is actively involved in various aspects of Fajr Capital’s transactions (including origination, execution and portfolio management) and strategic initiatives. He is also a member of Washington D.C.-based Emerging Markets Private Equity Association’s Middle East Council. Prior to Fajr Capital, Kamal was a senior lawyer at Ashurst LLP in London and Dubai. He recalls his first legal role at Blake Morgan, a regional legal firm in Southampton, UK, which provided the strong foundation for his eventual move into international in-house legal work. ‘By pure luck this team was comprised of mainly ex-city lawyers, which meant we were usually working on a number of significant deals—including ECM and private equity work—despite being a regional firm. In the absence of abundant resources and an army of people one would find in a city firm, there was a requirement to be resourceful, innovative and take on responsibility at an earlier stage. All very usual experience for a lawyer in-house, especially in the Middle-East’, he highlights. Whilst at Ashurst’s London office, Kamal jumped at the chance to move to Ashurst’s Dubai office in early 2008—which is where he originally worked with Fajr Capital in an external counsel capacity. His work resulted in an in-house job offer from Fajr Capital, which Kamal accepted when he was ready for a new challenge in mid-2011. Kamal explains that he joined Fajr Capital at an exciting stage in the firm’s growth trajectory and his transactional experience became an important component in executing the firm’s investment strategy. ‘There was no legal function at Fajr before I joined’, he explains, ‘but a refocused investments team and an integrated legal team meant we were able to originate off-market opportunities and invest in great companies’. As he has grown into the role, Kamal has added investment and portfolio management responsibilities to his legal ones: ‘I now sit on the board and the executive committees several of our portfolio companies, including Cravia Group and Global Environmental Management Services. This creates for a varied workload and provides excellent commercial exposure and opportunities to add value to our portfolio companies’, Kamal explains.

Throughout his career, Ali Khalaf has always sought to combine his legal ability with business acumen. Indeed, he places this business expertise (honed using expert knowledge gained via an MBA from Kogod School of Business at American University in Washington DC) as instrumental in his being identified as an ideal candidate for an in-house role by Rasmala Investment in UAE. Khalaf was working in private practice prior to this in Washington DC, and Rasmala Investment has provided his first experience of life as corporate counsel. His successful rise through the ranks at Rasmala was the springboard for his accession to his current position of general counsel with Dubai-based alternative investment firm and operator Evolvence Capital. Khalaf mentions the variety of deals and projects he has worked on as being an aspect of the job he particularly enjoys. ‘Since my time with Evolvence commencing in 2012, we have, amongst other accomplishments, raised finance for and built two new schools, listed a related company, led six acquisitions, exited an investment and launched two PE funds of funds’, he explains. Khalaf has also had a marked effect on the way the legal and compliance functions operate at Evolvence during his tenure: ‘Upon joining, I looked to enhance and implement legal-related documentation, particularly with respect to compliance and training, and have looked to modernise and institute software that can retrieve and assist in filing. We have also built up the team with a proper compliance focus, and we now have three compliance professionals as part of the department’. When recruiting, Khalaf is keen to seek out those who fit his template for what makes an excellent corporate counsel. As part of this process, he believes that in-house lawyers should not be afraid to speak up when dealing with senior management. ‘You need to have the constitution to question the CEO and members of the Board’, he points out. ‘Being deferential can be a disservice to those you are advising and ultimately the shareholders. My primary responsibility has been and remains to ensure that all stakeholders are aware of the parameters in which to operate on behalf of the company; however, it is more and more imperative that my team always have a variety of alternatives and advices while upholding our duties to the company,’ Khalaf concludes.

M1 Group is a family-owned Lebanese investment company, with origins in the construction and telecom sectors. Because the Group today operates in a diverse range of sectors in countries across the globe through its subsidiaries, its general counsel is highly knowledgeable and adaptable when understanding the company’s business needs and accommodating a plethora of regulatory regimes. After May Khalife was appointed general counsel, she immediately set about restructuring the legal department in order to align it with the Group. Since then, Khalife has assisted M1 Group on a number of key deals; in 2015 the company acquired a majority stake in fashion brand Pepe Jeans Group with L Capital Asia, an Asian private equity fund. A year later M1 Group’s food and beverage subsidiary, MNM Investments, was granted the franchise rights to launch multiple locations in Lebanon for ice cream maker Cold Stone Creamery under a 10-year master franchise agreement. In 2017, M1 Group’s other subsidiary M1 Financial Technologies agreed to buy Bank Audi’s electronic payment and card services business in a deal worth $185m.

Khalid Khan has almost unparalleled experience of legal work in the Middle East, having practiced at a high level at law firms and in an in-house capacity at a variety of companies, including renowned family-run firms that have been at the centre of the Gulf economy for decades – in his case, MH Alshaya and his current company, The Zubair Corporation. He speaks extremely positively of this experience, placing his experience with these heritage companies as among his career highlights. ‘I have been extremely fortunate in working with two of the leading merchant families in the Gulf’, he recalls. ‘Both are ambitious and have expanded far outside their home markets to become heavyweight players globally, and both place an emphasis on ethical behaviour because they value their reputation more highly than money – you underestimate the old Gulf trading families at your peril as they are shrewd and savvy’, he concludes. As to how he made a success of his move to in-house work, Khan is clear that it was a learning process that he worked extremely diligently at. ‘I enjoyed developing expertise in these areas from scratch’, he explains, ‘and recognising what you don’t know, being passionate about what you do, and being willing to learn new things are essential ingredients to growth that stop you getting bored’. At The Zubair Corporation, Khan has managed to replicate his customary level of success, and speaks enthusiastically about a number of deals he has spearheaded during his tenure there. ‘In the last two years alone’, he says, ‘I have helped Zubair’s new oil & gas team set up two oil & gas companies, acquire just under 30% of an international oil & gas company listed in Ireland and the UK, win a major exploration and production contract and acquire 100% of a producing block from PTTEP (a listed entity part-owned by the Thai state)’. Khan outlines a series of attributes that he feels are key for a senior in-house counsel to possess: ‘Hard work and unflinching honesty are indispensable, as is a willingness to learn about the business in order to find practical responses to business issues’. Ultimately, Khan concludes that one should ‘never forget your role is to act as guardian and custodian of the best interests of the shareholders’.

Managing the legal matters of a healthcare company with operations across eight countries is not a small task, and one that requires the management skills of an exceptional general counsel. Ajith Madhavan has been head of legal at Dubai-headquartered Aster DM Healthcare since 2010, when he joined the group to create an in-house legal department, rationalise documentation and reorganise external legal services. When Madhavan arrived just before Aster DM Healthcare entered into a period of rapid international expansion. At the time the company had 50 operational units in three GCC states; now the group has almost 320 across nine countries in the Middle East and Asia. According to CEO Alisha Moopen, the expansion is set to continue: as well as operating hospitals, diagnostic centers, medical centers, and pharmacies in the Middle East, India and The Philippines, Aster DM Healthcare is looking to expand into Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa. This increasing internationalistion of the company, as well as a forthcoming 2018 IPO in Mumbai or London, will test Madhavan’s 19 years’ experience of corporate law. Madhavan’s impressive support during such a rapid expansion, and in a notoriously highly-regulated sector, have led to wide-spread praise for his work. One external lawyer commented on his ‘outstanding work ethic’, his ability to ‘pay a lot of attention to details’, and his ‘excellent understanding of respective local laws and legal practices’. Before joining Aster DM Healthcare, Madhavan was legal manager at Concept Group in Dubai, was a legal consultant at Dar Al Adalah Advocates, and was an advocate in the High Court of Kerala in India.

SEDCO Holding (Saudi Economic and Development Company) is a leader in Sharia-complaint investment management, with a broad portfolio including real estate, private equity and operating companies. SEDCO’s diverse holding sees it operate wholly- and part-owned companies in over 40 countries across the world. Supporting the holding company’s efforts across a diverse geographical and operational spectrum is Dr. Zaid Mahayni, the group chief legal officer (CLO). Having joined SEDCO in 2015 as vice president of legal affairs, Mahayni was quickly promoted to the CLO position after demonstrating his capabilities and dedication. In the space of two years, he has made a large number of changes to the workings of the legal department. These have included the introduction of project management tools, improved record keeping, created uniformity in work processes and increased the amount and types of training offered to the team. Indeed, training is something that Mahayni has been passionate about for most of his career, and under his guidance ‘SEDCO holds an internal training platform which offers certificates to participants’, he says. At SEDCO Mahayni believes that cross-disciplinary learning between departments and operated companies can be just as important as legal training. ‘SEDCO Holding is a conglomerate with investments in retail, automotive, hospitality, banking, food and beverages, real estate, educational, and health-care businesses. This implies that I am asked to interact daily with people with diverse specialisations, and this has helped me learn concepts from other fields. For instance, I have learned about accounting, risk management, supply-chain management, and other areas. Cross-disciplinary interactions forge more capable and seasoned professionals’, he says. As Saudi Arabia is making more changes to its legal and judicial systems, the role of in-house lawyers in the country, and the wider GCC, is becoming increasingly important. It takes dedication to monitor the number of alterations as well as a diligent in-house lawyer to ensure that the company complies fully and quickly. Mahayni believes that ‘the group CLO must be able to quickly study the impact of new [and/or] anticipated legislation and determine the adaptation measures that may be required. Adaptation measures may vary in particular instances and, hence, a cost-benefit analysis must be performed with the involvement of the company’s management’. Mahayni has excelled at this in the last two years, and his interaction with the rest of SEDCO’s c-suite has allowed the company to react quickly and effectively even during a time of economic downturn and market challenge. It is fair to say that the support of the legal team, and the expert management of Mahayni, have both been crucial as the company has developed into a well-governed and world-class international investment holding group. Mahayni holds a Bachelor of Law (from the Université de Montréal), a Masters of Law (from the University of Dundee), and a PhD (from the University of Leicester). He also has numerous post-graduate diplomas (for example, a Diploma in Downstream Petroleum Economics and a Diploma in International Commercial Arbitration) and certificates (for example, the Harvard Law School program of negotiation). Mahayni is also registered with the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Justice as an arbitrator, as well as being a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Before joining SEDCO, Mahayni spent a decade working as an attorney at the Law Firm of Hassan Mahassni, which is based out of Jeddah and is associated with international law firm Dechert.

Landmark Group’s Praveen Maheshwary is an analytical lawyer with 17 years of experience of handling legal affairs in India and the Middle East. A professional who has demonstrated excellence in controlling legal matters and opinions, Maheshwary heads legal affairs of the Saudi Arabian operations of one of the largest conglomerates in the Middle East, providing full support to group activities, which include hospitality & leisure, healthcare and mall management. Maheshwary is known for his long-term vision in influencing strategic business decisions and stands out for his competence in negotiating contracts and skill in conducting patent analytics and business intelligence. Capable of making decisions within a fast-paced and high-pressure environment, Maheshwary has showcased an ability to assess legal issues and produce professional results while adhering to strict deadlines. Prior to moving to Saudi Arabia in August 2016, Maheshwary worked as group legal manager at consumer electronics company EUROSTAR Group. Before that, he held several short term in-house legal positions at various companies in India including Urban Infrastructure Venture Capital Limited, Bombay Dyeing, Raheja Universal, India Gypsum, Coca-Cola India and Hindustan Unilever.

Founded in 2008, Bahrain Airport Company is responsible for managing and operating Bahrain International Airport, which saw almost 10 million passenger pass through it in 2016 and is used as the airline hub for the principal flag carrier of Bahrain, Gulf Air. Currently assuming the role of general counsel is Fayyaz Mahmood, who has been working at the company since 2011 and is a qualified barrister in London. Mahmood assumes responsibility for the company’s agreements at all stages from conception to execution, involving the writing and review of these agreements as well as preparing BAC’s contracts. Such agreements and contracts span several aspects of the company’s business, including licenses, leases and other general business contracts both domestically and internationally. Mahmood holds a position as secretary to the Board of Directors, whereby he is entrusted to ensure that all directives are being monitored and that the company strategy is both legally viable and compliant, an extremely important task considering the hefty weight of regulations airports and other airline companies are subject to.

One of the most significant achievements in Anuraag Malhotra’s career since joining the Dubai headquartered multinational conglomerate Landmark Group in 2004 has been establishing a well organised legal department; the team has grown from a one-person function to a ‘highly efficient and business focused team of professionals’. Malhotra has also ‘conceptualised, designed and created a corporate and tax structure for the Landmark Group from scratch,’ he explains. As the group is among the largest retailers in the Middle East and India, Malhotra’s achievement in designing a highly efficient structure that handles legal issues in over twelve countries has been hugely impressive. A highly rated tax legal professional with an eye for organisational improvements, Malhotra has received wide praise for developing an efficient transfer pricing tax mechanism for Landmark Group, fine tuning the structure to meet OECD BEPS challenges. Formerly legal counsel and company secretary at GE, Malhotra cherishes his participation in his first M&A transaction, a deal within a complex, industrial environment, that created ‘an excellent foundation’ for Malhotra to ‘lead complex deals both as a strategic advisor and a deal lawyer’. Initially starting his professional career as an accountant at Unilever, Malhotra has since not only been able to seamlessly adapt to a corporate legal environment, but also to establish a stellar reputation for being one of the brightest and most reliable in-house legal professionals. When asked to share tips with other in-house lawyers, Malhotra says: ‘I believe in-house lawyers should strive to expand the scope of their contribution to the business. This is particularly important considering the immense contribution they could potentially make to their business, due to their extensive business knowledge and experience, which has sadly been unexploited due to our own inhibitions.’

In 1999, Saudi Chevron Phillips Company (SCP) was the first private sector investment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s petrochemical industry. The facility is owned 50 percent by Arabian Chevron Phillips Petrochemical Company Limited (ACP), a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, and 50 percent by Saudi Industrial Investment Group (SIIG).

Launched in 2002 with the aim of attracting tourists for medical services and treatments, Dubai Healthcare City (DHCC) is a healthcare free economic zone that aims to meet Dubai’s demands for high quality patient-centred healthcare. Since its establishment, DHCC has been able to strike strategic partnerships to provide cutting-edge services in healthcare, medical educations and research, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and wellness. Heading the legal function at Dubai Healthcare City Authority (DHCA), the organisation that oversees the zone, Lubna Masoud provides full legal support to the operational activities of four distinct divisions: healthcare, education and research, investment and regulatory. Her expertise in corporate law, governance and joint ventures has been noted by colleagues, as has her success in aptly dealing with unforeseen circumstances and legal challenges across DHCC’s diverse range of new initiatives. Prior to joining the authority, Masoud worked at the Dubai based real estate developer Emaar Properties International.

Bruce McAlister joined GE in 2000 as senior counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa and has since assumed various positions within the company supporting the GE Aviation Division. In his current position as general counsel he is responsible for all legal, regulatory and compliance matters arising from the operating businesses in the energy, oil and has, aviation, healthcare and transportation sectors, across all emerging and developing regions, including members in Asia. In this capacity McAlister leads a global team consisting of a multi-disciplinary team of lawyers, compliance professionals and contract managers. Amongst his most recognised achievements, McAlister recently led the legal in the acquisition of Avio’s aerospace business in a cross-border transaction valued at USD5.8bn. McAlister has proven himself as an exceptional leader, leading complex cross-border international transaction and leading a compliance organisation tasked with the implementation, maintenance and investigations of GE’S corporate compliance and ethics policy. He offers the following advice to GCs and other corporate counsel looking to reach the same heights he has: ‘My advice to another general counsel or in-house lawyer would be that it is fundamental to understand the business, it’s products, services and financial position completely in order to provide holistic service. At the same time, it is imperative to develop and foster close relationships with the CEO, the board and senior leadership akin to that of a “trusted advisor”, so that you are part of the team and actively sought out to deal with each challenge facing the company. In order to deliver on your mandate for the provision of legal and compliance services, I would strongly recommend that you hire the best locally qualified resources in each jurisdiction, as their knowledge of the legal environment, and the risk profiles of the company operating in that country, will give you a far more expedite service to the business and its transactions. Lastly, continuously look out for that risk, regulatory challenge or threat that could face the business’.

A perennial high-flyer, Rowan McBrien recently brought his considerable talents to bear on the Middle East energy market, having taken on the role of general counsel for Total E&P Qatar in September 2016. Beginning his career with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, McBrien made the move to Russian energy firm Sibir Energy in an in-house role a year before moving back to private practice work for a seven-year stint with Clifford Chance in Moscow, where he was eventually made a senior associate. From here, McBrien moved back in-house with French oil supermajor Total in their Paris office as a lawyer in their E&P division, where he was for four years. Now with an immense level of experience in energy legal matters gleaned through both private practice and in-house work, McBrien was the ideal candidate to take over the general counsel for Total E&P Qatar. The role looks set to grow exponentially in the coming years: in June 2016, Total announced the signing of an agreement with Qatar Petroleum granting them a 30% concession in the Al-Shaheen oil field for a period of 25 years beginning July 14, 2017.

Starting off as a private practice lawyer at Nabarro in 2000, Richard McLaughlin’s subsequent in-house legal career has taken him to various locations across the world, having headed legal teams at BG in Tunisia, India, Australia and the UK. Since 2014, he has led the legal function of Oman Oil Company Exploration and Production, a large upstream oil and gas company based in Muscat, Oman. Sitting on the company executive committee, McLaughlin has brought his team much closer to the business and has introduced a series of procedural enhancements to allow individual lawyers to provide more focused and pragmatic advice. Most noteworthy, however, has been McLaughlin’s achievement to alter the team’s culture: ‘We now feel we are much more proactive, and as a consequence central to transactional strategy, delivery and negotiation, dispute resolution and ethical conduct. The wider company has seen the benefit of this in several areas and our lawyers are much more visible across the company.’ During his time at BG Group, McLaughlin impressed with his transactional work, having led the transactional team for the Hasdrubal project in Tunisia. He says: ‘I was still pretty young in PQE (Post-Qualified Experience) terms, and running a complex suite of transaction documents simultaneously in English and French, plus dealing with an array of stakeholders, both internal and external, was a massive challenge, and opportunity.’ He has also received plaudits for playing a key role in large and complex oil and gas transactions whilst working at BG in Australia. When asked to give advice to fellow in-house lawyers, McLaughlin says: ‘Try to understand the business as much as you can. If you’re numerate and have the ability to broadly understand the technical aspects of how things work, even better. This is what distinguishes a good in-house lawyer.’

An expert in corporate legal matters in the energy sector, Gavin Milne recalls he was ‘immediately drawn to the energy industry and new-build energy projects in particular’ going all the way back to his first major legal role in Calgary, Canada. His successful, decade-long private practice career ultimately saw him work for Shearman and Sterling’s Abu Dhabi office, which brought him to the Middle East and its sprawling energy operations in a legal capacity. In 2006, Milne made the move from Shearman to an internal legal role with Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Development Company and speaks highly of its effect on his career: ‘Mubadala was a perfect platform to practice intensively in newbuild, project financed energy and infrastructure projects in a series of large and challenging transactions, across a variety of sectors and working with world class external counsel and top-notch partners’. From here, he explains he took ‘increasingly senior positions within a growing Mubadala legal department before accepting a position of general counsel of the $30bn UAE nuclear program with Emirates Nuclear Energy Company’ before moving into his current role as general counsel of Duqm Refinery and Petrochemical Industries in 2015. Milne retains the enthusiasm and enjoyment of his career that has served him so well. ‘For me’, he explains, ‘there is no better legal role than in-house GC of a large, complex and highly levered energy project, where you can focus on a single massive undertaking from the very early stages of design and feasibility and see it all the way through to completion and operations’. As someone who has been at the heart of some of the most complex and high-profile projects in the Gulf, Milne has his own clear idea of what in-house counsel should look to do for their businesses. ‘I am a big believer in breaking the legal (at least GC) role out of a traditional legal silo or any suggestion of being limited to a back-office support function’, he outlines. ‘I think the in-house legal discipline works best when partnering with the other key finance, technical and commercial departments in executive decision making and strategy; with the goal of providing proactive input early in the project development and company structuring phase in order to enjoy dividends in the future as the company matures into operations’, Milne advises.

The Investment Corporation of Dubai (ICD) is a highly influential organisation in the Middle East and worldwide, operating as the primary investment body for Dubai. As one might expect, the organisation’s investments are numerous and diverse (based around the overall goal of making Dubai a global hub for travel, leisure and financial services), including such prominent companies as Emirates, flydubai, Emaar Properties and Dubai Islamic Bank. Eric Milne is general counsel for this sprawling operation, having taken over the role fully in November 2016. Prior to this, he was a partner with Jones Day in Dubai with a particular specialisation in funds and associated financial legal advice, making him an ideal candidate to take over the role with ICD.

As general counsel of one of the most prestigious and prominent non-profit organisations in the world, Michael Mitchell holds unique insight into how these organisations are run, and is among the most respected GCs in the region. Given its stated mission of education and knowledge gathering, his prior career makes him an ideal fit for his role with the Qatar Foundation; he previously spent over eleven years in senior legal positions with Ohio State University which culminated in a role as vice president and senior associate general counsel. Mitchell (alongside overseeing legal matters for its sprawling operations and interests) is able to provide the benefit of both his experience as an in-house lawyer and as someone with high-level experience of the education sector to upper management, with whom he liaises closely on strategic matters.

Sophie Moloney has had a decorated in-house career since moving on from the TMT practice of UK law firm Ashurst in 2003. After a seven year spell as a principal legal advisor to Sky, Europe’s leading entertainment company, Moloney moved to Abu Dhabi in 2011 as legal director under a secondment to support the launch and ongoing business of Sky News Arabia until 2013. She places this as among her all-time career highlights. ‘Being part of the team that launched Sky News Arabia was a remarkable achievement in a short space of time’, Moloney recalls. ‘We literally built the building to house all of the employees we recruited and from a legal and regulatory perspective; it was a literal first in terms of the licenses we needed to seek and then be bound by, without any local precedents to fall back on, and I adored this challenge’. She was seconded again by Sky to Abu Dhabi Media (ADM) where she led a project to re-launch ADM’s flagship news show, Oloum Al Dar, and assisted the managing director’s office on a series of special projects, including the transition of its pay TV business, the internal merger of two significant departments in TV and the development of a channel content strategy. Moloney also spent some time on secondment with twofour54, the commercial arm of the Media Zone Authority in Abu Dhabi. In 2015 OSN, the leading premium pay-TV platform in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), recruited Moloney as general counsel and company secretary responsible for the management and development of the legal department, ensuring adherence to the corporate governance structures and commercial contracts as well as all laws and regulations applicable to OSN’s evolving business throughout the MENA region. Having shone in the role, she was made chief legal officer after 12 months. Moloney is well recognised in the profession, having spoken at a number of conferences in the Middle East as well as being a prominent personality in the fight against the growing rates of piracy as she seeks to highlight the existential threat of content theft to the creative industry as a whole. Moloney describes how she has successfully developed the team to be an integral part of the company: ‘I am a big believer in the power of the team and that, to be a part of a team, you have to be a team player both looking in within legal and also outside to the business. Being open and approachable are key attributes I have looked to embody. And I am in constant dialogue with our CEO and the wider executive team which helps sets the tone for others to see the importance of this integration into our key decision-making’.

After making the move into in-house legal work within brand-new company Gulf Aviation Academy in 2011, an organisation that trains captains and first officers for Gulf Air and other airlines, Fadia Mubarak quickly showed her aptitude in this role. Among other accomplishments, she successfully built an effective legal team from scratch during the three years she was employed here. This achievement and others were noticed by major downstream aluminium facility Gulf Aluminium Rolling Mill, and she was taken on by them as general counsel in June 2014. Again, Mubarak had to develop an in-house legal department from scratch (though this time with an already established company founded in 1981), and sought to build it based around her own principles of what an in-house team should do. ‘The most important thing for an in-house lawyer to keep in mind is excellent organisation and time management’, she outlines, ‘as work overload is common. As well as this, you should look to engage other departments as much as possible and utilise this to achieve business objectives’, she adds. This collaborative approach underpins much of Mubarak’s work: ‘my style is always based on team work, and an in-house lawyer should improve team work and liaise with senior management as much as possible, but this relationship should go both ways; this would definitely improve the quality of work’. An issue close to Mubarak’s heart is that of increasing the number and seniority of female legal personnel in in-house roles in Bahrain. ‘I think that one of the most important changes that could be made to the in-house legal profession in my opinion is that we as female lawyers look for more opportunities and support wherever possible’, she explains. ‘That, and practicality in legal training needs to be higher and could be improved a lot. Lawyers should always receive practical training and updated associations to improve their knowledge, rather than simply learning technical skills’, Mubarak concludes.

A multilingual lawyer that is responsible for ‘managing all aspects of the legal function as part of the risk management division’ at Mashreq Bank, Fadi Mudarres, in his role as senior vice president and general counsel, is recommended as one of the premier in-house lawyers in the United Arab Emirates. Based in Dubai, Mudarres provides the Mashreq Bank with comprehensive legal advice across all its business lines, including the management of complex litigation across various jurisdictions and ensuring there are templates and procedures related to asset recovery. Mudarres is well in sync with the needs and risk profile of the Bank having worked at one of the UAE’s most important institutions – it was listed by Forbes as one of the top 100 companies in the Arab world – for almost a decade. He is also a member of the UAE Banking Federation legal committee enabling him to contribute to the discussion of the wider conversations taking place with regards to the specific factors that pose threats to the Bank and its operations.

Qatari satellite communications operate Es’hailSat, also known as the Qatar Satellite Company, employs a legal team that is charged with ensuring its range of satellite service provisions are legally sound and compliant. Es’hailSat’s fleet of satellites provide services including direct-to-home television services in Middle Eastern and North African regions, including through the channels of broadcasting giants Al Jazeera and BeIN Sports, and as such require a multitude of oversight in a legal and compliance context. Possessing a number of years of experience in the sector, Khalid Musa, general counsel of the company, is able to dispense advice that is drawn from a deep knowledge of all applicable aspects of the law including corporate, commercial, technology and communications legal matters. Having accrued experience earlier in his career at law firms in Dubai including international firm Dentons, Musa moved in-house in 2010 to join leading telecoms group Etisalat where he spent over five years as a legal counsel informing the company’s board and management about how to successfully navigate risks and hurdles in the telecoms sector. Joining Es’hailSat in December 2015, he current takes responsibility for the management of re-structuring, joint venture, consortium, M&A, licensing, systems integration, procurement, supply, distribution, outsourcing, service, employment, and intellectual property agreements.

Mohammed Noaman is highly regarded by peers in the in-house Middle East community for his ability, experience and track record of in-house legal success. Indeed, the GE Power and Water legal team as a whole is often mentioned as among the best-respected in the region. Educated in Egypt and the United States, Noaman rose to the level of Partner at private practice firm Bakka in Egypt before moving to an in-house role with Danone and then Kraft Foods. Moving to GE in 2009, Noaman originally worked with the healthcare business as regional counsel for Africa before being posted to Riyadh. In May of 2017, Noaman’s eight years’ experience with GE and immense legal know-how meant he was the ideal individual to take on the role of general counsel for Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. This international role requires him to draw on the significant cross-border experience and area knowledge amassed through his impressive in-house career to date.

Firas Oggar has immense experience of senior in-house roles in the Middle East, having had four roles in the position of either head of legal or general counsel since moving on from his six-and-a-half year private practice career in March 2007. He first took on a job as legal counsel for Kipco North Africa Holding Company based in Kuwait, where he eventually became general counsel, before switching sectors to work for Wataniya Telecom in 2010 as head of legal. From here, Oggar moved on to Foulath Holding Company, the investment arm for Gulf Investment Corporation sovereign wealth fund, which was heavily invested in the steel industry across the MENA region. His tenure with diversified conglomerate Al Ghurair Investment, began in December 2015 as Oggar looks to add real value to this 57-year-old company as well as providing concise and easily digestible legal advice to his commercial counterparts. Firas has been instrumental in contributing to the company’s bottom line through a cost saving plan and a collection strategy of various claims. He integrated the legal department into each respective industry such that it is viewed as a business partner. Firas has expanded the legal function and restricted the outsourcing of work to litigation and specialist areas. Al Ghurair’s investments span a number of sectors, including real estate, energy and foods, which provides Oggar ample opportunity to display his top-level attributes and financial nous.

Originally from Puerto Rico, Doraliz E. Ortiz de Leon is a bi-lingual, US-qualified lawyer who moved to Dubai in 2009 after gaining first-rate litigation skills at the Puerto Rico’s Department of Justice, the United States District Court for the District Court of Puerto Rico and international law firm Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell from 2003 onwards. In 2010, Ortiz de Leon was hired as group legal adviser to ENOC, a leading integrated global oil and gas player wholly owned by the government of Dubai. She initially joined as a group legal adviser but having consistently performed in the role where she was in charge of litigations, contractual negotiations as well as contributing to the development and implementation of ENOC’s business ethics and compliance program, Ortiz was promoted to head of legal and regulatory compliance in 2016. In recognition of her expertise, experience and valuable insight, Ortiz has spoken at summits in the Middle East on anti-corruption and financial crime practices affecting the industry. She obtained a Juris Doctor in law from Harvard Law School in 2003.

Vodafone Qatar turned on its network in March 2009 and, now into its eighth year of operations, its growth plan continues alongside solid revenue postings for 2017 so far. Matthew Osborne, who supplies investor relations and company secretarial expertise to the business alongside being director of legal and regulatory, made the move to Vodafone Qatar in 2011 after serving as general counsel of the telecoms firm’s Irish operation for five years. Having already proven his expertise in Ireland, Osborne continued in this vein as soon as he moved to Qatar, presiding over a significant growth in revenue share of the company during the course of his tenure. On top of this, he had a major part to play in regulatory negotiation relating to areas the company was looking to expand in, successfully securing potential revenue streams in the process, and took care of pressing litigation matters for the company. All the while, Osborne undertook initiatives that reduced costs company-wide, providing excellent value add to the business in the process.

As part of his role as head of group legal at Qatar National Bank, David O’Sullivan oversees one of the largest legal teams in the MENA region with 130 employees across several countries. Apart from expanding his team to include experienced international and junior Qatari lawyers to be based across the bank’s various offices, O’Sullivan has developed a unit known for its unparalleled levels of transparency, knowledge sharing and personal development opportunities. His efforts to focus on cost control and his work to identify commercial wins from contract negotiations have ensured notable improvements in efficiency across the function, which have received company- wide praise and acclaim. A skilled corporate negotiator, energised by the fast pace and variety of deals, O’Sullivan has worked on complex transactions to buy leading banks in Turkey, Egypt and Nigeria. By facilitating notable deals, such as the acquisitions of Finansbank (Turkey), NSGB (Egypt) and a minority stake in Ecobank (Africa), O’Sullivan and his team have been an integral part of Qatar National Bank’s strategic international expansion.

The Al Baraka Banking Group is a leading international Islamic banking group providing retail, corporate and investment banking services in countries across the Middle East and North Africa, and benefits from the legal counsel and commercial nous of Salah Othman Abuzaid, senior vice president and head of legal affairs and compliance. Sitting at the executive management level of the Group, Abuzaid is a presence at the highest level of strategic decision making and is able to relay strategic direction and illustrate a full risk management profile from a legal and compliance perspective. With over three decades of experience in various aspects of the legal sector – he has worked as a judge, a private practice lawyer and legal consultant for a variety of domestic and international law firms and financial instructions – Abuzaid is extremely well placed to support the business of the Group’s numerous subsidiaries across the regions it serves. An extremely well-travelled professional, Abuzaid accrued over 20 years practicing the law in Sudan before working at an Omani law firm and subsequently being admitted to practice in all Omani courts. Prior to joining ABG he worked at Al Baraka Islamic Bank as Manager, Legal Affairs, and in his current capacity Abuzaid also serves as Secretary to the board of directors of ABG and some of its board committees, demonstrating his senior management abilities.

Serving as general counsel at Abu Dhabi Ports Company, Emil Pellicer stands out for his strong leadership skills, which have translated to impressive functional improvements to the legal unit. Joining the company as its first general counsel, it was to define the scope of his role. ‘My vision was to integrate the legal team with the commercial and operating teams such that both teams work as an integrated whole,’ he states. ‘In order to achieve this, it was important for me to demonstrate the benefits of integrating my function into the decision-making process at the highest level of the company. Being appointed to the executive committee was a vindication of my vision of how legal can add value throughout commercial and operational processes.’ Pellicer’s work to nurture talent within his team has also been highly impressive, thanks to his outstanding mentoring skills. Developing a highly productive work environment based on help and support has enabled professionals within the team to generate the expertise necessary to provide high quality strategic advice to the business, Pellicer says: ‘I’ve always thought of the in-house legal function akin to a law firm with one client as opposed to being a department whose primary purpose is to procure and manage external legal services. As such, it was essential to ensure that my team evolves with the company and is given the tools to do so. Ensuring that my team and I remain trusted advisors to the company is our number one goal’. As Abu Dhabi Ports Company has experienced exponential growth in the past few years, transforming from being a project company building a new port, to an operator of several ports in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere, Pellicer has had to deal with a plethora of challenges. ‘It has been a challenge for us in the legal unit to keep up with this growth without outsourcing all of this new work to external advisors. We are overcoming this challenge by acquiring in-house capability on those legal aspects of the new business lines which occur frequently and outsourcing the rest. The goal is to expand the former,’ Pellicer states.

Responsible for a wide range of corporate, commercial, investment and financing matters, the general counsel position at GFH was filled by Nicholas Polley in June 2017. The Islamic investment bank is clearly happy with the appointment with an official source saying, ‘Polley brings to his role in GFH over 20 years extensive experience in the legal field including multi-jurisdictional expertise from working with reputed international organizations’. Prior to joining GFH, Polley was general counsel and company secretary at SEDCO Capital from 2013 onwards and was widely acclaimed for demonstrating his expertise in Islamic finance in his role at the leading Sharia-compliant private wealth management company. Before his distinguished time at SEDCO Capital, Polley spent almost three years at law firm Charles Russell Speechlys as partner advising on structuring international transactions. Between 2004 and 2008, Polley was associate general counsel at Exterran, a worldwide market leader in oil and gas production equipment. The expertise and experience he has developed in all his previous roles have earned Polley numerous industry awards and means he is perfectly placed to continue excelling in his new position at GFH Financial Group.

Upon joining the Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company, Simon Price undertook the ambitious task of streamlining his company’s processes and procedures by means of imbedding the role of the legal function into the company’s delegation of authority matrix. He says: ‘This has been augmented by producing from scratch a large suite of standard and “balanced” contract documentation for all areas of the business which is supported by training and guidance to staff who regularly administer and negotiate contracts. The reliance on standard ‘balanced’ contract documentation has dramatically reduced turn-around times for closing deals’. According to Price, ‘the contracts are continuously fine-tuned and simplified to take into account comments and queries from users and counterparties’. Besides his work towards organisational implementations, Price also receives acclaim for his transactional work. In particular, his efforts towards managing a fast-track tendering process for a significant project financed district cooling concession for Capital Centre, a large mixed-use property development in Abu Dhabi, received particular praise. While working on the transaction, Price managed a multi-disciplinary team of external advisors and played a leading role in negotiating a number of complex long term agreements with a large number of interested parties. At the onset of the process, Price also invested a considerable amount of time and effort to assemble a talented team of legal advisors. ‘It was a wide-ranging role well beyond the normal scope of in-house counsel and on this I reported directly to the ADNEC board,’ he says. ‘It is believed that this was the first or one of the first project finance deals for a large district cooling project in the Middle East in which ADNEC, as the party granting the concession, was not one of the off-takers of district cooling. The off-takers were the 23 plot owners and investors in the Capital Centre development.’ Prior to joining ADNEC in 2008, Price spent some time working for the international security company Olive Group, where he played a leading role in managing the target side of a private equity investment in the Group led by private equity firm Monitor Clipper Partners. ‘It was a demanding transactions for a host of reasons, including multiple time-zones, time-pressures and an army of professional advisors across many disciplines, and it took a lot of sweat, teamwork and determination to get to a satisfactory close.’

Lubna Qassim is the group general counsel of Emirates NBD, the largest banking group in the Middle East, which, owing to its reputation and a total asset portfolio worth around USD $122bn, requires diligent, timely and business savvy legal advice from its chief in-house lawyer. Operating within an organisation that has a large scope in terms of its remit and its own size – Emirates NBD is one of the UAE’s largest companies by employee numbers – Qassim is required to provide comprehensive legal and compliance support in addition to showing strong leadership in her role on the bank’s executive committee. Qassim is highly pleased with the progress she has made in improving the legal function at Emirates NBD and is complimentary of her team: ‘My biggest pride is that I have built a fit-for-purpose in-house legal function for EmiratesNBD and lead a team of a diverse and highly motivated professionals’. On top of this, she is expert at combining her strategic managerial input with her responsibilities as head of the legal team: ‘I have a very strong relationship with my team and being an executive member of the bank I work very closely with my executive colleagues which gives me full visibility on how we should be adapting our priorities to serve the business most effectively’. An outstanding professional, Qassim is not only defined by her role at Emirates NBD, but is also highly active in other fields; she is a fellow at the Dubai School of Government and undertakes leadership roles in various bodies, having seats on the boards at the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment (CISI) and Injaz UAE Foundation, enabling her to work towards bringing together and inspiring young people to succeed. Qassim is also a speaker on issues that will affect the landscape of the law and business for years to come including governance, education and female leadership. Perhaps the best indication of her outstanding reputation came in 2015 when Qassim was elected to the Dubai Women’s Establishment by Dubai’s ruler HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, where she works to increase the number of women in employment and leadership positions in the UAE. Given this extra-curricular passion of hers, she provides the following advice to up-and-coming members of the in-house legal community: ‘My advice to another GC would be that you have to be more than just a lawyer. To be effective you have to have strong technical skills but also the personality and drive to influence the overall activities of the business as someone whose advice is always sought out’.

Telecoms company du occupies an important place in the history of the diversification of the UAE’s economy, as it was the first domestic telecoms company to challenge the market upon its founding in 2005. It has grown exponentially since this time, achieving over 50% market share within five years of the company’s launch, and now boasts huge revenues (over $3.4bn for 2016) as well as a constantly expanding portfolio of products. Anneliese Reinhold has been with the company every step of the way during its precipitous rise to the top, having served with them since the end of 2005. She has both a top-tier understanding of telecoms in-house legal work and perhaps unparalleled experience in growing and nurturing start-up businesses to establishment and beyond, as she explains: ‘Du was actually the second telecoms start-up of my career! In my previous role as group general counsel at Qatar Telecom (now Ooredoo), I provided all of the legal & regulatory support to the Qtel consortium’s $104m bid for the first competitive mobile licence in the Sultanate of Oman. Qtel’s was the winning bid, so I then handled all the legal and regulatory work surrounding the establishment of Nawras (now Ooredoo Oman) as well as acting as its initial Board Secretary’. Reinhold is recognised internationally for her achievements, and is highly active in extra-curricular legal activities; she is currently a non-executive director of the Association of Corporate Counsel, based in Washington DC. As such, she is passionate about creating and nurturing the next generation of legal talent to fill the in-house ranks of the future, offering them the following advice: ‘Avoid the current trend of over-specialising at an early age. Instead, strive to gain broad experience across a wide range of areas/disciplines, as this will stand you in good stead for a successful in-house career’. She feels that educators have as much a part to play in this as well, believing that current educational methods could be updated. ‘I would suggest an overhaul of the approach to the teaching of ethics’, she explains, ‘particularly as it relates to the in-house profession, to adopt a more practically oriented approach. This would align the legal world with, for instance, the chartered accountancy profession, where ethics education is focussed around specific practical threats and safeguards’.

An expert at acquisitions with a deep understanding of the real estate market – and an alumni of the prestigious Sorbonne University in Paris – Kamal Rhazali joined Katara Hospitality in 2013. Prior to this, he had a highly successful career as a private practice lawyer based in Paris, Dubai and Casablanca during which he advised a number of high-profile multinational companies. This experience no doubt sets him up incredibly well to lead the legal function of Katara Hospitality, which is no mean feat given that the company owns 22 of the most prestigious luxury hotels in the world outright, and operates many more. The company being backed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund allows it to maintain a highly active corporate strategy that prizes a constantly expanding portfolio. This looks set to continue for many years, with Rhazali’s immense experience in M&A work providing excellent support to Katara Hospitality’s endeavours.

Alex Ridout has always combined corporate ability with legal attributes in his career, but did not originally envision working in the oil and gas sector, originally qualifying in a boutique London legal firm. Moving to the Middle East region in 2002, he realised the huge opportunities in oil and gas for a top legal counsel and took up a position in-house with Baker Hughes, where he significantly strengthened the on-ground regional legal and contract support of the NYSE-listed, global OFS company. At his next job, Dragon Oil (where he was brought in ‘specifically to create the legal function’ of the business), he had a similarly successful tenure: ‘between the time when I joined in April 2006 until I left in late 2012, the production had increased more than four-fold and the company’s share price had improved significantly’. From here and, ‘looking for a change’ after six years with Dragon Oil, Ridout made the move to Lamprell in November 2012 where he has been ever since. Having spent long periods improving the fortunes of all three of the companies he has worked for in an in-house legal capacity, he emphasises his commitment to the cause: ‘I suppose the theme in my career is that, from having made a decision to go into oil and gas, I have been committed to the oil and gas upstream sector at a senior level for more than 15 years’. This resolve has manifested itself in a number of highly impressive projects and contracts successfully executed. Perhaps chief among these is his work on the $5.2bn deal with Saudi Aramco and other high-profile partners to create an extensive maritime complex in Eastern Saudi Arabia, which was publicly announced in June 2017. ‘This project has been ongoing for 18 months’, he recalls, ‘and I was involved from start through to shareholder approval. It has taken a huge amount of time and effort throughout, and seeing it through to approval is a very proud moment’, says Ridout.

Karl Rogers is one of the most respected general counsel in the Middle East, as well as being one of the leading structured finance and derivatives specialists in the in-house legal community globally. Keen to share his considerable expertise for the benefit of the profession as a whole, Rogers is the Chairman of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Middle East Committee and a member of the DIFC Courts’ General Counsel Forum, a testament to the esteem in which he is held by the financial world. He has also recently been appointed to the Legislative Committee of the Dubai International Financial Centre. He recalls that he acquired his passion for banking on secondment to a trading house in the USA while practicing with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in the 1990s: ‘at the time, the firm I was seconded to was particularly innovative and at the leading edge of the development of the derivatives market, and the experience of working in that environment really gave me the holistic commercial experience that led to the desire to work in house’. He moved to an in-house role shortly after this, establishing a team of structured product lawyers at a global investment bank in London and, apart from a successful period as an equity partner with Norton Rose in Dubai some years later, has worked with banking organisations ever since. At Standard Chartered (one of his former clients when at Norton Rose) for the last seven years, Rogers is General Counsel for Africa and Middle East. Based in Dubai, Rogers has a team of around 90 individuals reporting to him across the Bank’s extensive coverage of the region. As for why he moved to the Middle East and enjoys working in this region and Africa, Rogers is clear: ‘In Africa and the Middle East there are a lot of challenges, a lot of excitement and a huge opportunity for adding value. I am fortunate to work with a very talented and diverse group of people who are colleagues and friends and the appreciation we have; for each other, our respective cultures and the important role we play not just for the bank but for the communities we are present in allows us to collectively gain energy and drive from working together’. Rogers is highly optimistic about the change he and others in financial institutions can make to the Middle East and Africa. ‘I have always wanted to come in and make a real difference when I take on a role’, he explains, ‘and if banks can appropriately balance serving their clients and supporting the communities in which they operate, they can really assist in developing a country’s financial system and economy’. Rogers continues to enjoy the collective business goals of working as an in-house lawyer: ‘When I was in partnership, we had a great bunch of lawyers many of whom are still good friends but inevitably everyone is judged by their own profitability. In a bank or other in-house role, you can sit there with the head trader, CEO or even the head of IT, and can get your heads together to work out how to solve problems for the good of the whole organisation, whether related to an individual transaction, general process or fund raising for a worthy cause such as Seeing is Believing, Standard Chartered’s drive to alleviate curable blindness.’

Ahli United Bank is the largest bank in Bahrain by total assets, being founded in the year 2000 on the back of a merger between The United Bank of Kuwait and Al-Ahli Commercial Bank. Andre Roos, group head for legal and corporate affairs, has immense experience of the institution. He originally joined the bank in August 2001, and has been there ever since for a total of over 16 years of service. This offers him unparalleled insight into the bank’s operations and, by extension, the financial market in Bahrain as a whole. Alongside his legal responsibilities, Roos contributes to the strategic direction of the bank by providing input to the executive management of the institution. Effective in-house legal support is just one reason why the company is in a particularly successful period at present; in July 2017 Ahli United Bank announced a record net profit of $311m.

CNOOC Iraq is the largest overseas subsidiary of CNOOC, China’s biggest producer of offshore crude oil and natural gas. As the Iraqi branch of the parent company, CNOOC Iraq is the operator of the country’s Missan oil field. A year after the company was founded in 2010, LV Ruhong was selected to be general manager of its legal department. Ruhong had impressed the parent company between 2005 and 2011 as a legal supervisor in various downstream sections across CNOOC from gas and power, refinery to petrochemical imports and exports. In that time he participated in the renegotiation of a major liquefied natural gas (LNG) sale and purchase agreement for the first large-scale LNG project in mainland China constructed and managed by domestic enterprises. ‘I acquired substantial legal and commercial experiences as a trailblazer negotiator in the then emerging LNG businesses’, Ruhong recalls. Since moving to Iraq, Ruhong has built CNOOC’s first overseas legal team concentrated on legal risk management for overseas large oil and gas projects, and succeeded in setting up the structure, strategy and methods of legal management in a systematic way to ensure the effective management of legal risks within the company. ‘I was recognised as innovative and courageous in adopting new ways of management against diversified and complex overseas environment, in particular in the Middle East and Iraq’, he says, adding: ‘In light of the unique and sophisticated situation of Iraq, I closely monitored the host country’s laws and policies and conducted thorough legal research to keep abreast of any changes’. Ruhong serves as a member of CNOOC Iraq’s joint management committee and is responsible for all significant decision-making in terms of petroleum operations in oil fields. During the process of fulfilling all these responsibilities, he has endeavoured to be a counsel to senior management and was involved in the overall strategic decision-making process, because of his ‘ability to discuss managerial and strategic issues beyond the typical and strict legal perspective’.

With over $3bn in revenue and more than 63,000 employees, Kuwait-headquartered Americana Group is the largest integrated food company in Middle East. It has activities across 13 countries in the MENA region, predominantly in the operation of restaurants, food and beverage outlets, and manufacturing facilities for food products. Americana Group is not only the largest operator of restaurant chains in the MENA region, but also one of the most successful franchise operators in the whole world, encompassing twelve world-leading brands such as: KFC, Pizza Hut, Hardee’s, TGI Friday’s, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, LongHorn, Signor Sassi, Costa Coffee, Krispy Kreme, and The Counter. Shehzaad Sacranie has been general counsel at the group since December 2016, managing its legal challenges from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Since he joined the company it is fair to say that Sacranie has been kept busy. On 7 March 2017 Adeptio AD Investments bought an additional 26.6% stake in Americana Group for $930m – taking the investment fund’s total ownership up to 93.4%. Following this, on 30 March 2017, the Americana Group board announced that it would approve a voluntary delisting of the company from the Boursa Kuwait. This change in ownership has been a challenging time for many at Americana Group, but the transition has been smoothed by the impeccable work of Sacranie and his legal team. Before joining Americana Group, Sacranie was general counsel at Mubadala GE Capital, a joint venture between GC Capital and Mubadala Development Company. Sacranie’s role at Mubadala GE Capital was his first in-house, having previously worked at law firm Allen & Overy for 10 years.

Safwan Said is an Australian-qualified General Counsel, with seven years’ experience at Waha Capital, an ADX-listed investment company, and ten years’ experience in top-tier law firms in Australia and the Middle East. At Waha Capital, Said established the legal department from scratch, and currently leads a legal team of 4 members. He has an expertise in leading international corporate transactions for financial sponsors, and has personally led complex, cross-border, award-winning deals at Waha Capital that have helped transform the business from an aircraft leasing company to a leading investment management company that currently has around US$ 3 billion of assets under management. Beyond transactions, his responsibilities cover corporate governance, company secretarial and compliance functions. He also plays an active role as a member of the company’s investment committee, and is also a member of a network of UAE-based private equity firm general counsel. Said was short-listed for the 2015 General Counsel of the Year Award by the Association of Corporate Counsel – Middle East.

A legal counsel with over 14 years of experience, Hussein Saleh has demonstrated a capacity to combine his knowledge and proficiency of different areas of the law to provide a comprehensive legal service to ALARGAN, one of the leading real estate companies in Kuwait. Described by colleagues as a ‘smart, ambitious and highly motivated person’, Saleh utilises his strong leadership and judgement ability to lead and support the legal department. In addition, Saleh’s role covers a variety of task ranging from legal risk and policy deployment to the management of litigations and the negotiation of contracts on behalf of the company. Prior to joining ALARGAN, Saleh spent a year at the law firm Al Tamimi & Company. Before moving to Kuwait in 2014 worked as an in-house lawyer in Egypt at the leading organisations CIB Egypt, Venus International and El Shams Real Estate. Highlighted achievements in Saleh’s career include his work on transactions such as capital increase and decrease projects and a liquidations, as well as internal organisational projects such as the rollout of a smart archiving system and the introduction of a regular and accurate registers for a group of shareholding companies.

Menha Samy is no stranger to high-value transactions, having worked on multiple significant projects during the course of her 16-year career. Samy recalls that, while engaged as a private practice lawyer (during which she rose from the rank of trainee to partner with Egyptian law firm Ibrachy & Dermarkar), ‘the biggest deal was with Lafarge Egypt construction’, and while working as an in-house lawyer for GE she was involved in its landmark $2bn deal to supply gas turbines and other generators to supply power to Egypt. Samy spent over five-and-a-half years focusing on the Midde East and North Africa with GE and, alongside the Egyptian power generator deal, Samy mentions as another career highlight that she ‘worked through the integration of the Alstom power business into GE Power’. This was complex, being ‘the first time Alstom and GE worked together using lawyers of both companies’. ‘We had a team of 15 individuals and the project involved horizontally working across the whole region’, Samy goes on. Her multi-jurisdictional and cross-border expertise is finely honed due to her role as counsel responsible for MENA for GE, with Samy feeling she has ‘built a large amount of experience in operating in difficult geopolitical regions’ that pose unique challenges. Her strategy for dealing with these external factors – though of course significant geopolitical effects cannot always be mitigated entirely – relies upon detailed cultural, political and economic understanding of the regions involved. ‘You have to marry compliance with actual regional and local expertise as much as possible’, she explains. ‘We also look not only at the time of contracting but at the time of project execution and beyond’, in order to truly appreciate the risks inherent in a project. As someone who has built a legal team from scratch, Samy outlines what she believes makes an in-house legal team great. ‘It is about being humble and building a team with capabilities that are better than the counsel themselves, a team that is better than the sum of its parts’, says Samy. Recently (in June 2017), Samy has moved on to become legal counsel Middle East and India for global high-end cosmetics powerhouse Chanel at their Dubai office. This notable change of sector is evidence of her willingness to test herself and continue to achieve new and exciting career goals, a trait which has already manifested itself in her legal work to date.

‘My role is a constant balance between being a trusted advisor, protective influencer, strategic thinker, risk taker and moral compass’, explains Kiran Scarr, general counsel of Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, an organisation that provides the physical, market and financial infrastructure required to establish Dubai as a hub for global commodities trade under the authority of the Dubai government. Scarr has had a major influence in several important developments to the legal department at the Centre, taking steps to embed lawyers within operational businesses and contributing enormously to ‘transforming the view of legal as business enablers’. Scarr also facilitated the creation of a “legal charter”, which acts as a ‘written promise to the business to be transparent in its communication and to be of service to them’ evincing her commitment to not only serving the business but doing so in clear, mutually agreed terms. Scarr states this development has ‘greatly assisted the business to understand how we can add value beyond advice on commercial contracts’, helping define her and all other in-house lawyers at the DMCC as true business partners rather than just lawyers. By virtue of the location and the nature of their business as a free zone licencing authority (and their role as custodians of other regulatory framework within the commodities trading sector), there are numerous geo-political, social and economic factors that Scarr must consider. She has shown her talent and eye for efficiency by undertaking reorganising and integrating all legal and regulatory aspects of the company into one streamlined function that delivers ‘at one consistently high standard… with greater transparency regarding DMCCA’s role as a regulatory authority’. A key player within the business structure, Scarr has a direct reporting line to the CEO and enjoys a seat on the company’s executive committee – demonstrating the trust in her not only as a legal counsel but as a leader at senior level. Scarr explains that the qualities she expects to see in GCs have a common factor and focus on ‘dedicating time to people over processes’. A strong advocate of encouraging women to advance into leadership positions, she has recently participated in panel discussions as a panel member and moderator on topics including “leading through change” and contributed a feature article in The Oath Middle East Law Journal, entitled “making diversity a priority”. Despite having a multitude of career highlights, Scarr illustrates the ‘restructuring, attracting and retaining top talent’ to DMCC Legal and her promotion to head up DMCC Authority in 2016 as particularly notable, all adding to several years’ experience in international law firms across locations in Edinburgh, Sydney, Singapore and Dubai.

Aldar Properties is the largest developer, investor and manager of real estate in Abu Dhabi. In recent years the Abu Dhabi property market has encountered some difficulties, and, although not as badly hit as neighbouring Emirate Dubai, real estate companies like Aldar have had to seriously consider their ongoing strategies. It is in times of challenge that the benefit of a good in-house lawyer can truly be seen. Since January 2012, Brett Scrymgeour has been Aldar’s general counsel, managing legal matters with a team of seven lawyers and two non-lawyers. The property market in the UAE has continued to change, and Abu Dhabi released a new real estate law in 2016 – drawing on its internal expertise Scrymgeour and team enabled Aldar to be the first developer to successfully register and launch a project under the new law. This rare market circumstance allowed Aldar to continue to lead the market due to the speed, accuracy and management skills of Scrymgeour. Upon joining Aldar as general counsel, Scrymgeour also took up a position on the management committee of the company, sitting alongside the chairman of the board of directors, the CEO, CFO and other Executive Directors. It is from this position that he is able to advise the company on its strategic direction, as well as ensure compliance is upheld at the highest level. Before joining Aldar Properties, Scrymgeour was senior legal counsel for the real estate division of Mubadala Development Company, a state-owned company that is mandated with the management of Abu Dhabi government’s diverse investments. Between 2005 and 2010, he was a senior associate with Clifford Chance between the London and Abu Dhabi offices.

Established in 2009, the Qatar International Court (QICDRC) was designed to be an international-tier dispute resolution centre and court aimed at cementing Qatar’s place as a global financial centre. The court aims to be the leading international court globally, and so top in-house legal support is a must. Dr Zain Al Abdin Sharar fulfils this role for QICDRC and brings with him a wealth of experience gleaned from tin-house and academic legal work. Sharar worked at Qatar University for three years as an assistant professor of commercial Law and has taught companies law, arbitration Law, Maritime & Aviation Law here and at Ahmad Bin Mohammed Military College (ABMM) in Qatar. Additionally, he has lectured on many topics at the Legal and Judicial Studies Centre at the Qatar Ministry of Justice. Prior to joining QICDRC, he was director of the legal and enforcement team at the Qatar Financial Markets Authority (QFMA), giving him unparalleled experience of capital markets legal work. Dr. Sharar goes into further detail about the innovations he has been involved with while at QICDRC. ‘The Court continues to adopt innovative working practices’, he explains, ‘and one of the key focus area has been to establish legal seminars based on current hot legal topics. This has enabled us to make a connection with the legal community and stakeholders, and by this process we have been able to successfully establish dynamic line of communications. This has enabled the Court to leverage its international vision to the global legal community’.

PepsiCo is one of the best known food and beverage companies in the world, owning a gamut of high-profile and market leading brands. In recent years the Middle East region has been a tricky market for the Fortune 100 company, and the consumer goods market as a whole is often known for its disputes and legal challenges. It is in this setting that Dean Sheehan operates as vice president and general counsel for PepsiCo in the Middle East and North Africa – overseeing a team of 20 lawyers based at the UAE regional headquarters. Sheehan originally joined PepsiCo’s Dubai office in September 2012 to take a role as senior director for legal. As he excelled in this position and demonstrated his tangible commercial impact, Sheehan was promoted to his current role in February 2015. He has launched a number of high-impact initiatives since joining the company, but perhaps the most influential in the long term is the MENA legal department’s ‘first rolling three-year strategic plan and KPIs to measure value and success’. According to Sheehan, ‘this has allowed the wider company to understand the performance and effectiveness of the department in language that the business understands’. Communication of complex and often difficult messages is something that Sheehan excels at, and it can be considered a foundation stone of his career. When asked how he has managed the legal team and company through significant market challenges over the years, his answer is outstandingly pragmatic: ‘You overcome these challenges by embracing and accepting the “super-VUCA” (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world we live in and see this as exciting and critical to one’s personal and professional development. Your colleagues accept this is the reality of today’s world, what they need to know is that their lawyers have the knowledge, processes and relationships in place to help them deal with, and respond to, these realities quickly and effectively’. Sheehan’s ability to deliver results has seen him promoted to the senior leadership team for the MENA region; he now sits alongside the region’s president, CFO, CHRO and CMOS, making strategic decisions and implementing key projects for the region. Before joining PepsiCo, Sheehan was vice president for group legal at Al Tayer Group in Dubai.

Formerly known as Saudi Hollandi Bank, Alawwalbank is the first bank in Saudi Arabia founded in 1926 as a branch of the Netherlands Trading Society. Plagued by financial and political difficulties in the region over the past decade Alawwalbank relies heavily on its highly qualified legal team to support its objectives. To achieve a proper in-house legal culture, the team’s ‘diligent and attentive’ leader, Marouf Shweikeh has undertaken substantial training of the lawyers within the function. As a result, Alawwalbank’s legal unit now not only achieves high levels of integrity, but also handles 90% of all legal work faced by the company. This is particularly impressive, given the team’s small size when Shweikeh joined the company. Shweikeh says: ‘At first, the legal department consisted of three lawyers concerned with day to day banking activities and did no work with an international effect. Currently there are ten people in the legal department and I focus on engaging the lawyers in the business culture. Our lawyers now understand the business much better and often engaged in international forums and other events.’ Prior to joining Alawwalbank in 2013, Shweikeh worked in the legal departments of the Central Bank of Bahrain and TAIB Bank. He started his legal career at the law firm Mohammed Shweikh , where he served as a partner of over twelve years.

The huge expansion of airline operations in the Middle East, especially the GCC states, has been one of the most obvious success stories of the region’s economic plan over the past two decades. Dubai based carrier flydubai, in contrast with other UAE-based carriers Etihad and Emirates who tend towards a blue-chip product with a correspondingly higher price tag attached, fill the region’s need for low-cost, high-volume air travel provided by a large number of smaller jets. In common with the national carriers, however, flydubai has made huge investments in cutting-edge aircraft, and recently took delivery of their first Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft with another 75 of these brand-new machines on order. The multi-billion US dollar deal to acquire these jets was presided over by general counsel and senior vice president Krishan Sinnadurai, and is just one example of the complex and high-value projects that a GC at a major airline has to oversee. Sinnadurai has been with the carrier almost from its inception and established the legal function for the airline – growing the legal team to 13 lawyers at present and counting, and ensuring that the legal function is core to the commercial workings of the entire organisation, advising on all manner of projects – legal and commercial alike. He has been at the helm of other large projects for the airline, including the airline’s launch of business class in 2013, its first bond issuance (an Islamic Sukuk) in November 2014 of $500m (oversubscribed), the growth and expansion of the flydubai network to over 93 destinations in 44 countries, major aircraft finance deals on a variety of financing structures, a large scale project financing, and the recently-announced Emirates-flydubai cooperation. Additionally, Sinnadurai has crisis management, brand and reputation management experience – continuing to lead all aspects of the airlines response (including the investigation and all aspects of compensation, legal liability and litigation strategy) following flydubai’s tragic accident of flight FZ 981 in March 2016. Sinnadurai has immense experience in the aviation sector, having been senior legal counsel for Emirates before moving to flydubai in January 2011. Prior to moving to Dubai in 2008, Sinnadurai was a senior lawyer at a top Australian law firm and had also worked in the Australian Government sector in legal and public trade policy capacities.

Since 2008, Dean Stelfox has taken charge of the legal function for Dubai South (formerly Dubai World Central) as general counsel. Dubai South is an emerging 145 km2 city built around Dubai’s $32bn Al Maktoum International Airport which will ultimately sustain a population of one million workers and residents. Dubai South focuses on the aviation ecosystem and the facilitation of fast cycle logistics within a Free Zone environment. Already home to 40 of the world’s largest companies, Dubai South is entering the next phase of development, delivering and investing in built to suit (BTS) campuses for its key international partners and is well on its way to becoming the aviation and logistics capital of the world. The legal and business support required to sustain this long-term, megacity project are correspondingly vast. Fortunately Stelfox is well-equipped to handle the role. Formerly working in-house for BT and in private practice for boutique London-based firm Kemp Little, he gained experience in litigation and ICT. He moved to the Middle East as a legal counsel for Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) in 2002 where he worked on ENOC’s expansive international upstream and downstream operations. In April 2008, he began his tenure with Dubai Aviation City Corporation and has grown the legal department from sole counsel to a team of five lawyers (which includes two Emirati Nationals) specialising in joint ventures, Islamic financing, real estate, construction and regulatory affairs. Dean is a member of various committees and councils including Dubai South’s Executive Committee and the Legal Committee of the Dubai Free Zones Council. Stelfox explains in detail the vast amount of changes he has made to the internal legal function of the company: ‘I have been fortunate to have started with DACC just two years’ after its inception with almost a blank slate, and have made a point of ensuring the culture of the legal function is accessible to all, no matter how large the project or small the query. This has allowed me to identify and track the needs of the business over time, build a rapport of trust and confidence across the board and quickly standardize contracts, policies and other legal documentation so a fairly small legal team can deliver results efficiently and effectively. The level of accessibility also means we have our finger on the pulse of the organisation and can quickly implement changes from lessons learnt’, he concludes.

Ben Swagerman’s varied career, involving positions at the very highest levels of private practice, state judicial and in-house, places him as one of the most experienced and well-respected corporate counsel currently operating in the region. Perhaps the most notable period of his legal career prior to going in-house was his 18-year tenure as a public prosecutor for The Kingdom of Netherlands, both in its European and its Caribbean region, the Dutch Antilles, culminating in him being appointed chief public prosecutor. From here (combining it with a notable political career as a senator in the Dutch parliament), he moved into the aviation industry as head of corporate security for KLM, where he worked for over ten years until August 2016. Since then, he has been employed at airline giant Qatar Airways, one of the fastest growing airlines in the world. Swagerman explains that Qatar Airways had ‘a well-organized legal department and contracts department’, but that he was brought in specifically to have oversight on this, particularly ‘oversight on the more complex and sensitive legal matters and privacy and general data protection regulation in Europe’ given his immense experience in these areas. Of the recent diplomatic dispute in the Gulf, Swagerman is adamant that the company’s overall fortunes will be affected as little as possible : ‘Political turmoil and human conflict in history has never prevented commerce from continuing, albeit in adjusted ways’ he states. The company is, also, lodging a complaint with the International Civil Aviation Organization aimed at regaining Qatar Airways’ access to the currently restricted airspaces as part of a direct response to the issue. Swagerman believes the best quality an in-house lawyer can have is a commercial mindset. ‘It is of key importance that you are able to think in a business-like manner’, he outlines, ‘as the typical stance of lawyers is that their primary attention is to stick to the rules. Secondly’, he goes on, ‘I would say that in-house lawyers should try to move away from the traditional standards and think outside of the box, as most regulations and laws are typically written for a relatively short future; as political operator myself, I know that stakeholder management is very important and can even allow you to have a hand in moulding the rules as they are made. If you can, try to make coalitions with industry friends in order to do this’, Swagerman advises.

Appointed group general counsel at the Commercial Bank of Dubai in 2013, Souhayel Tayeb has since implemented new technological changes aimed at streamlining work within the legal function. Legal portals utilised by all internal clients have been introduced, with users now able to select the type of advice they are requesting (legal opinion, review of documents, drafting of documents etc.). ‘The case is assigned to a lawyer and the dashboard helps all stakeholders to follow up,’ Tayeb says. ‘This helped in producing accurate reports for the department on the amount of workload, understanding the departments requiring most of the advices, being proactive in planning training and content of newsletters’, he goes on. Other technological improvements have included a legal database, which ensures that all litigation cases are captured and updated accordingly and all third parties’ agreements are added, as well as a process of automation to drafting of standard documents. Prior to joining his current employer Tayeb managed a team of three lawyers dedicated to loan and security documentation, service agreements and trade finance. As prior to moving to UAE, Tayeb worked as a corporate and investment banking lawyer in France, Tayeb had to quickly adapt to an entirely new work environment. He says: ‘I joined Mashreqbank just five days after leaving Paris. My first legal opinion was about a Letter of Credit and the delivery of poultry shipment to Jebel Ali Port. This change from the world of derivatives to the real world of trade finance was an amazing experience.’

Since joining Caracal Light Ammunition, a producer of various calibre small arms ammunition for military, commercial and specialised purposes, Daniël Venter has established the legal department from scratch. Since 2015, he has implemented new processes, procedures and systems and standardised contracts and forms, whilst optimising the supply chain and commercial department’s interface with legal. At the start of Venter’s tenure the department was experiencing substantial legal backlog, however his work with the supply chain at the company to streamline the acquisition system and to identify and codify legal obligations with suppliers and customers resulted in remarkable improvements. Currently, Venter is in the process of setting up the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) program at the company, to ensure compliance with US weapons export regulations. Besides his organisational skills and long term vision in implementing operational improvements, Venter boasts an impressive transactional track record having supported complex M&A deals over the course of his career. Namely, he has played an instrumental role in the acquisition of Caracal Light Ammunition and Burkan Munitions Systems by the Emirates Defence Industries Company. At present Venter provides advice to the final stages of the merger between Caracal Light Ammunition and Burkan Munitions Systems. His previous work experience features stints at Edgewaterm BV & Associates and Loedolff & Venter Attorneys.

Jacques Visser heads the legal affairs division of the Dubai International Financial Centre Authority (DIFC Authority), and holds the position of secretary to the DIFC higher board and the boards of the DIFC Authority and DIFC Investments. Additionally, Visser currently serves as DIFC’s security registrar and commissioner of data protection. With over 20 years’ experience as a financial services lawyer, his expertise lies in multi-jurisdictional investment structures, funds, asset management and regulatory matters in emerging markets, as well as investment strategies and related M&A transactions. During his expansive career, he has established a number of landmark funds and investment structures relevant to the MENA region. Prior to joining DIFC Authority, Visser was a national partner at Dechert in Dubai, and was listed by The Legal 500 as one of the top three most notable lawyers in the UAE investment funds industry. Before this, Visser ran his own consultancy firm, where he focused on advising a number of emerging and frontier market investment boutiques. He was also a founding partner and managing director of DIFC-based firm Algebra Capital, which was sold to Franklin Templeton Investments in 2011. Following the acquisition, he served as the executive managing director and supervised the merger of the two firms. Throughout his career, Visser has displayed his aptitude to coordinate his innate commercial instincts and immense business experience with outstanding technical legal skills to achieve consistently excellent results in demanding and high-profile roles.

Emirates is one of the premier airlines globally, ideally placed to serve international routes and connect East to West from its headquarters and primary hub Dubai International Airport – it is stated that approximately two-thirds of the world’s population lives within an eight-hour flight from Dubai. It is notable for the fact that all of its over-200-aircraft fleet are large wide-body airliners (including 95 Airbus A380 ‘superjumbo’ jets capable of carrying over 600 passengers in some configurations), and its position as fourth-largest airline in the world by scheduled passenger-miles flown. Taking ultimate responsibility for the legal operations of this sprawling travel enterprise is Rick Ward, senior vice president of group legal. He originally worked as an in-house counsel to Emirates in the 1990s, and thus boasts immense working knowledge of the company and air law in general, key attributes that made him the perfect fit for his current role, which he took on in 2012. Aside from Emirates, Ward worked in private practice in Australia for DLA Piper and in an in-house capacity for Deloitte Consulting.

MBC Group is notable for being the first free satellite broadcasting company service available in the Arab world, being launched in London in 1991. It moved to its current headquarters in Dubai in 2002 and has since then provided a range of television and radio channels to cater to a full cross section of society across the region. John Whitehead has been with the company almost since its inception, joining it in 1996 prior to its move of headquarters to the Middle East. Over 21 years he has seen the company expand massively both in the scope of its products and in the organisational efficiency within its ranks. With over twenty years’ experience in the media sector, Whitehead counts among the leading legal professionals in the sector in the Middle East.

Brigitte Zammit made the move from private practice in London to an in-house role with Emirates International Telecommunications (EIT) in 2008 and has not looked back, having been with the telecoms investment arm of sovereign conglomerate Dubai Holding ever since. Indicative of the considerable esteem in which she is held by the company is the fact that Zammit progressed to the position of general counsel rapidly, achieving this professional milestone in early 2010. Her role focuses on managing the significant telecoms operations that EIT has over the years had throughout EMEA: ‘EIT being an investment company, my primary role is that of a corporate/M&A lawyer, leading and managing negotiations in acquisitions, divestments and financing/refinancing transactions across multiple jurisdictions. This has required not only a familiarisation with cross-border legislation but also strong leadership and negotiation skills’. Zammit has played a leading role in a number of major transactions carried out by EIT during her tenure. Significant among these include EIT’s sale of 30 and 60% stakes in Interoute and GO respectively, and the successful spin-off and listing of GO’s real estate business into Malta Properties Company which was the first deal of its kind in Malta. Zammit is required to keep the company abreast of legislative and regulatory developments that may affect them as a whole. ‘Making a conscious effort to keep up-to-date with the fast-evolving business that EIT operates in is also an ongoing process’, she explains, ‘and I made it a priority from the outset to put into place and ensure compliance with a more rigorous corporate governance framework’. Zammit’s strategy for operating as a senior individual within a major international company is to lead from the front and get to know the business directly by regularly visiting various offices globally, some of which are located in turbulent geopolitical regions.

‘Brilliant, extremely trustworthy and able to understand business concerns,’ Ziad Zarka leads the team responsible for legal and compliance support of the global activities of Muntajat, a wholly owned government company that markets and sells most of Qatar’s petrochemical products. Praised by colleagues for his ‘judgement and business acumen’, Zarka seamlessly supports 18 international offices. From an organisational perspective, Zarka’s achievement to develop and implement its corporate structure and migrate eleven companies have been particularly impressive. In addition to his legal role, Zarka also serves as company secretary to the corporate subsidiaries and as secretary and officer of the ethics and compliance committee. Previous ventures in Zarka’s career include general counsel or legal director positions at Tasweeq in Qatar and Bristol-Myers Squibb and NewScope Group Holdings in UAE. At the onset of his legal career he worked in the United States as an in-house lawyer at two Fortune 200 companies in Texas. In addition to his law experience and license, he holds an MBA and is a registered US patent attorney and licensed mediator with CEDR.

A mark of their commitment to quality throughout the organisation, Etihad recently became the first UAE-based airline to receive the highly coveted five-star rating by prestigious airline rating organisation SKYTRAX, and is now part of an elite group of only nine airlines rated as such globally. To maintain such consistently high standards, the level of performance from all members of all Etihad Aviation Group companies is expected to be incredibly high. Etihad Aviation Group was formed in recent years as part of a corporate reshuffle which places Etihad Airways, Etihad Airways Engineering, Etihad Airport Services, Hala Group and Airline Equity Partners under one coordinated business function, and in May 2016 Henning zur Hausen took over as general counsel and company secretary of this huge corporate entity. He is an ideal fit, boasting experience of international air operations gained from previous roles at Luxembourg-based air cargo firm Cargolux and Lufthansa Cargo.