About

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.’