What are the most significant cases, projects, or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

As one of international engineering companies, our mission is to negotiate and delivery successful projects through-out the world to pursue our purpose “Enhancing Planetary Health”.

Recently, we have successfully negotiated and been awarded the Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Installation (EPCI) Contract for the Tangguh UCC Project in Indonesia. This project is a CCUS project that separates the reservoir CO2 from produced gas and reinjects it back into the offshore gas field. Not only does it reduces the carbon footprint but it reuses the CO2 to enhance the productivity of the gas field. This will be one of the largest CCUS projects in the world.

In addition, in collaboration with our partners, we have successfully established a new Joint venture business for Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and build the first plant in the world that will produce SAF from used cooking oil. Our Legal Department took the main role in negotiating and establishing the joint venture and also in negotiating various contracts including EPC in realising this project.

We believe JGC and its Legal Department is uniquely positioned to pursue our goal to “enhance the health” to achieve the Carbon Neutral Society.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

In a crisis, it is essential to gather the facts, analyse the situation and render appropriate legal advice to manage and ensure the resilience of the organisation. We have established a crisis management task force that is headed by our CEO. General Counsel is a key member of this task force and will have the support of the legal department as necessary to guide the organisation to minimise the risk from the legal perspective.

Given the current geopolitical shifts and growing uncertainties around international free trade, has your company’s risk profile evolved, and are you taking measures to address these challenges?

We are engaging with the management and the project team more frequently to discuss the risk we are facing in the uncertain geopolitical landscape. Also, we are considering addressing these uncertainties in the contract conditions as a special risk provision to discuss and appropriately allocate such risk among the contracting parties.

What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?

I am passionate about enhancing the diversity of the organisation. I believe that diversity makes the organisation more innovative, stronger and resilient. Recently we have hired many female lawyers and legal staffs and more than half of our members are female. There are a lot of talented females in the market and in fact, our new General Manager for Legal who just joined is a female. This diversity makes our legal department a very unique and innovative department in Japan.