About

HongKong and Shanghai Hotels (HSH) is a listed hotels company headquartered in Hong Kong, with operations in Asia, US and Europe, and the legal team in Hong Kong provides advice and work products for all of these jurisdictions. There are 13 people in the legal and company secretarial team led by Christobelle Liao, group director for corporate and legal, member of the HSH group management board, company secretary, and project owner for The Peninsula in Istanbul which is currently under development. There are three lawyers within the corporate advisory and compliance function: Nadine Maurellet, group general counsel, department head and co-project owner for The Peninsula Yangon (under development); Kitty Lam, senior legal counsel, focussing on risk management, compliance and operations and Grace Zhao, legal counsel and executive committee member of The Peninsula Shanghai focussing on the PRC region. The rest of the team is divided up into functional groups project coordinators, legal managers, company secretarial managers and officers, leasing contract officers and managers, senior legal officers and legal secretaries. In the last two years, the legal department has expanded beyond its traditional legal and compliance work to work on new hotel development and project management work. Two team members are project owners, responsible for delivering The Peninsula Istanbul and The Peninsula Yangon on time and on budget. The team has also advised on key successes for HSH, for example, it advised on a £650m (HK$7bn) loan facility for The Peninsula London project, the sales of that project and The Paninsula Yangoon residences. The team has also developed new operating processes within the firm such as revamping the code of conduct for the company’s operations, fair competition compliance programs, and GDPR together with a proprietary e-training programme for each. Liao describes the team as, ‘always striving to deliver a “Rolls-Royce” service to internal stakeholders and external clients. It invests in continuous improvement for our Group and within the department. It is not a traditional legal team as we embrace our business needs and are involved in the strategic development of the Group and various business units’. The HSH legal team won several industry awards in 2018 and continues to be recognised for their innovation and business support.