Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton

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Gamal Abouali

Gamal Abouali

Gamal Abouali is a well-respected lawyer who co-founded the firm's Abu Dhabi office. He has a strong track record in cross-border M&A transactions, most regularly acting for clients in the oil and gas sector. Gamal M. Abouali’s practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions, capital markets transactions, and projects. He has extensive experience in cross-border transactions, and throughout his career has had a truly global practice. Gamal joined the firm in 1997, became partner in 2006, and senior counsel in 2026. Before opening the Abu Dhabi office in 2012, he was resident in the New York and Paris offices
Chris Macbeth

Chris Macbeth

Chris is a partner and co-head of our global sovereign wealth fund client group. He is a skilled M&A and private equity/funds lawyer who has established an exceptionally strong reputation among sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors, and corporate clients, which have consistently turned to him for their most complex, highest profile matters in the Middle East and beyond. Chris has advised on investments in a variety of sectors, cross-border M&A and JVs and private equity and funds matters, including LP fund investments, co-investments, and direct investments (including VC deals and infrastructure investments), across a wide range of geographies (particularly the US, LatAm, Europe as well as almost all MENA countries). Chris joined the firm in 2006 and has been focused on deals for MENA clients and in the MENA region throughout the past two decades, initially from London and then from the UAE, having relocated to help found Cleary’s Abu Dhabi office (the hub of our MENA practice) in 2012.
Timofey Neklyudov

Timofey Neklyudov

Timofey’s practice focuses on cross-border M&A, joint ventures and private equity. In particular, he has extensive experience advising sovereign wealth funds, multinational corporates and other private clients on direct investments, co-investments and fund commitments across diverse sectors and jurisdictions. Timofey joined the firm in 2020. Prior to joining Cleary, he worked in the Moscow office of another international law firm from 2013 to 2019. Timofey is ranked as a Rising Star for Corporate and M&A in IFLR1000 (UAE) 2025 and was named Senior Associate of the Year at the LexisNexis Middle East Legal Awards 2025.
Mohamed Taha

Mohamed Taha

Mohamed Taha is a UK and U.S. qualified, and Egyptian law trained, capital markets lawyer and a native Arabic speaker - experience which is almost second to none in the region. He covers both U.S., European and UAE securities laws and is experienced in complex debt and equity offerings. He is able to provide regional cultural nuance to multifaceted capital markets transactions, providing international clients with strong reassurance on MENA deals that not only is the legal advice technically correct, but it can also be applied to, and is compliant with, the local regulatory frameworks. Mohamed is a Partner in our Abu Dhabi office but often works as a lead or co-lead partner on complex cross-border transactions due to his education and training, qualifications and experience across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. He has strong working relationships with the SCA and its counterparts in the U.S., the SEC, and UK, the FCA, which helps us when a transaction raises challenging or novel issues, requiring lengthy discussions with the regulators as to the interpretation of their rulesMohamed is also an experienced M&A lawyer and therefore can provide clients with end-to-end advice on complex corporate finance transactions with combined underlying M&A and ECM or DCM elements. Mohamed is also a co-founder of 10BE5. After seeing a gap in the market to address the way that capital markets lawyers handled the financial aspects of their disclosure work, the 10BE5 team looked at ways of automating the drafting of financial results analysis, a key component of capital markets disclosure documents, which is currently done manually by capital markets lawyers and/or in-house disclosure teams. The N2N product’s goals are to reduce mistakes, standardize work products, free up capacity, and achieve time and cost savings. The technology is used by several Magic Circle and top 10 Am Law firms.