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Middle East Teams 2016

Mubadala

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Middle East Teams 2016

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Mubadala

One of the major Middle Eastern investment arms, Mubadala’s portfolio accounts for US$127.8bn in total assets worldwide, contributing towards its stated goal of increasing prosperity for Abu Dhabi through diversified...

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About

Mubadala was formed in 2002 by the Government of Abu Dhabi to help implement its development and diversification strategy. With a mandate deemed essential to the future of the wider UAE and with His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan acting as chairman of the board of directors, the legal team has to carry a heavy weight of expectation. Mubadala’s centralised legal team provides advice to core support functions but also assigns legal counsel assigned to each of the four global business platforms Mubadala operates, and has lawyers embedded within various operating assets. Chief legal counsel and secretary to the board Samer Halawa oversees government relations, regulatory affairs, corporate strategy and corporate tax and is reported to by group general counsel Rodney Cannon and group head of governance and compliance Shahzad Khan. With US$67bn of assets and a significant global footprint, Mubadala faces the challenges of negotiating complex global regulatory frameworks. In response, it has built an impressive team of internationally qualified lawyers and compliance professionals and helped spearhead new ways of approaching compliance. In particular, the legal team has launched a code of conduct across all Mubadala-controlled entities to help establish a common compliance culture and shared expectations for integrity. This has been reinforced by an annual electronic training and certification process, and will be further supplemented this year with the launch of a smartphone compliance app, among the first of its kind in the region, allowing compliance submissions to be made remotely while delivering notifications, training and summaries. These initiatives have been recognised at a number of international compliance forums and cement Mubadala’s reputation for having one of the most sophisticated approaches to compliance in the region. The team’s recent transactional work has also been hugely impressive. In December 2015 it played a key role structuring, documenting and establishing a new $10bn global investment fund alongside China Development Bank Capital (CDBC) and China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). The team was also closely involved in the merger of assets between Mubadala and the Investment Corporation of Dubai, a US$15bn combination that has created a new national aluminium champion responsible for half of all primary aluminium production within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In early 2016 the legal team’s global expertise was called upon to facilitate an extremely complicated restructuring that occurred in a series of transactions that involved a significant amount of legal analysis and negotiation across multiple jurisdictions, including Brazil, USA, Colombia, Luxembourg and UK. In addition to acting as a catalyst for Mubadala’s many projects, the legal team has contributed toward the “Emiratization”, helping to develop UAE national talent through its national development programme and providing the means for several lawyers to qualify overseas and facilitating placements at prestigious international firms.

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