About

Barzan Holdings is a newly established company that serves as the investment arm of the Ministry of Defense of Qatar and whose mission is to strengthen Qatar’s sovereignty and support the long-term development of the country’s defence and security sector. Since January 2018, chief legal officer Toufic Abi Fadel has led Barzan’s legal function and since then has had to build the department and define the overall corporate governance of the company and its subsidiaries of either newly established or recently acquired companies. Assisting Abi Fadel in the department today is legal manager Sophie Courqueux as well as a junior lawyer, one legal coordinator, a paralegal and two legal translators with more legal professionals set to be joining by the end of the year. In describing the strategy behind developing the legal function, Abi Fadel says that he ‘would like to have a very strong in-house team relying on a centralised legal database and knowledge that we have accumulated throughout our careers’. Given the confidentiality of working in the defence sector, Abi Fadel highlights that Barzan will rely on a few external lawyers specialised in certain legal fields, but for the most part the in-house team will take care of all legal matters. ‘Our work in the company is directly impacted by the nature of the business. Unusual confidentiality measures need to be applied, outsourcing is done to a limited numbers of lawyers in a limited number of firms who are trusted for their competence and ethical behaviour by the team as a whole. The reliance on the in-house expertise is key to the success of the business [in a] highly regulated business where the legal team is playing a strategic role’.