Abu Dhabi Ports Company (AD Ports) – GC Powerlist
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Middle East Teams 2018

Transport and infrastructure

Abu Dhabi Ports Company (AD Ports)

| Abu Dhabi Ports Company (AD Ports)

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Middle East Teams 2018

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Abu Dhabi Ports Company (AD Ports)

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AD Ports has moved into an extremely exciting new chapter in its history recently, securing a position on the “Belt and Road” developmental initiative by the Chinese government to focus on trade and connectivity across Eurasia, being the only Middle Eastern entity officially to do so. AD Ports’ general counsel Emil Pellicer explains that the signing of this deal, which has led to the construction of a major industrial zone at the port, has meant ‘massive growth’ for the company in recent years: ‘We now have a China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO) concession [with] the Jiangsu Provincial Overseas Cooperation and Investment Company (JOCIC) contributing foreign direct investment into the UAE. Ties with China have increased tremendously, and this has led to us being one of the fastest growing ports globally’. The in-house legal team responsible for supporting these incredibly important deals is staffed with very high quality individuals, including Jason Walters, who negotiated the complex long-term lease with JOCIC to allow Chinese entities to sub-lease areas of the new industrial zone, and Shaima Shaheen, who played a key role in achieving concession deals for AD Ports with COSCO and MSC, the first and third-ranked shipping container companies globally. Pellicer and his team, taking their cue from the shipping industry with whom they often operate, are looking to integrate blockchain technology into their port in order to create greater logistical efficiency. Gaining a detailed knowledge of this much discussed but often less well-understood technology will, he believes, give them a competitive advantage going forward. ‘We are looking to streamline not the shipping side of logistics but portside’, he explains, ‘as we feel that that is the way to really get efficiencies around running a port, as everything can be rubber stamped from the comfort of an office’. Naming its work on this as perhaps the team’s most interesting project recently, Pellicer explains that blockchain ‘gets even more interesting once you get past the basic risk mitigation benefits of the technology; if you do transactions repeatedly entities are not just paying money to each other but value is aggregated’. While an extremely powerful technology if harnessed, Pellicer and his team believe that due to its complexity they are among the leading in-house legal theorists of it globally. ‘Quite frankly’, he says, ‘to a layman a lot of it is completely incomprehensible at first glance’.

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