About

Led by Salem Al Darei, the ADNOC Group legal team is staffed with the level of highly talented individuals one would expect of the UAE’s largest company, which is a multi-billion dollar revenue concern. Alongside Al Darei, senior legal counsel Mann El Aydi, formerly general counsel and company secretary for Abu Dhabi National Hotels, came in for praise, as did Kyle Knight, a newly-arrived senior legal counsel who focuses on upstream matters. On Knight, one nominator states that he is ‘an exceptionally effective counsel who consistently impresses with outstanding emotional intelligence and interpersonal and cultural awareness’, qualities that serve him well in the collaborative but highly motivated environment of ADNOC’s in-house legal team. Given the size of the company, it is no surprise that the ADNOC legal team has been in support of some truly gargantuan projects, one recent notable example being the July 2018 US$1.6bn deal with an affiliate of China National Petroleum Company to conduct an onshore and offshore seismic survey.