About

As general counsel of one of Dubai’s leading private equity and investment firms, Ali Khalaf has enjoyed an extremely diverse range of projects as part of his regular workload. He lists his top three projects as ‘selling a majority stake in a regional investment bank to a company listed in the UK, growing the legal team from one lawyer to a team of seven lawyers, five compliance and eight additional assets across the UAE, Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UK and taking a greenfield company public in the UAE’. In each of these, he says, ‘a great deal of new terrain was encountered. All required night and day diligence and working side by side with various regulators, total buy-in from everyone involved and understanding and marrying different perspectives. They shaped the department in a way that galvanised strengths, passions and legal and compliance acumen’. In order to keep up with its demanding workload, Khalaf has also spearheaded a number of technical innovations within the team. ‘We instituted a system of document, law statute and code inventory management that is state-of-the-art and has synergised a blockchain document management system seamlessly’, Khalaf says.