About

For the past three years, Simon Bladen has built up and led a nine-lawyer team across Mongolia and China, dealing with all legal aspects of Rio Tinto’s game-changing Oyu Tolgoi project. Potentially one of the largest mining projects in the world, it is, in Simon Bladen’s view‘a national icon’ with ‘the capacity to represent nearly a third of the country’s GDP’. On the flipside, the joint venture with Mongolia’s government has been subject to its fair share of conflict and setbacks along the way. ‘Simon has had to deal with a wide array of legal challenges,’ Michael Aldrich at Hogan Lovells (Ulaanbaatar) LLC says, and Bladen concedes, ‘Crisis management has frequently felt like the norm’. During his time leading the team, the project progressed from a construction one, to that of an operating mine. Bladen has led the implementation of a number of core processes and functions to, in his words, ‘achieve our aim of becoming the best in-house legal function in Mongolia (which we believe we have achieved) and head towards our ultimate goal of becoming the best in-house legal function in any non-OECD country’. These have included measures related to budgeting, choosing external counsel, training, risk assessment and building precedents. In efforts to support Mongolia’s evolving legal profession and education, Bladen has built relationships with national law schools to give students direct exposure to the project and help them understand its future impact on the country.