About

The PwC Middle East legal team is led by Middle East general counsel Fayez Khouri, who is supported by Carine Geagea, who manages a contract review team based in Beirut. They both bring their considerable experience, leadership and enthusiasm to the team and foster an excellent collaborative and friendly atmosphere within the team spanning Dubai and Beirut. The team deals on a daily basis with the biggest entities in 22 jurisdictions across the Middle East region (including governmental entities) and legal and procurement departments assist several lines of service within PwC, and interact and collaborate in order to achieve the greatest compromise between business and legal perspectives.

The team has grown and implemented significant internal changes in recent years and the establishment of a cost effective Beirut contract review team, an addition to the Dubai team, which has since evolved into an integral part of the office of general counsel team having grown from one lawyer to six in less than two years. The team also implemented a specialisation process where lawyers focus on specific fields such as litigation, corporate transactions or advisory, and serve as dedicated ‘business partners’ in that capacity. The biggest recent change has been the team’s restructuring of the firm’s contract review policy, reducing the number of contracts requiring review based on a strengthened risk assessment. In order to implement this restructuring, the legal team liaised very closely with the risk and quality team and put in place clear policies available for the teams to promote better understanding and efficiency. Another change is that the team has implemented is the PwC move to Google technologies for all of its commutations, which has improved connectivity of the team members in Lebanon and Dubai. Externally, the team has been active in PwC’s business in the Middle East. It negotiated and implemented “Global Master Framework Agreements” with several global “priority clients” such as a large Saudi diversified manufacturing company and a large sovereign wealth fund. These deals needed to be specifically tailored to the region’s laws using the expertise of the team.

The team also supported PwC Legal’s entry and distribution into the PwC Middle East network and develop business alliances in Saudi Arabia and Oman; advised PwC’s entity in Kuwait on the implications of the amendments to the Kuwaiti Labour Law, notably with regards to the end of service benefit and social security; and assisting in the setting up of a new entity for PwC in Oman relating to the provision of trainings; drafting and reviewing required documents and liaising with local counsel. When asked about the biggest challenges facing the company in the Middle East, Khouri says, ‘the new GDPR regulation has affected our team for the past year, given that from a contractual perspective, [we] must take into consideration this new regulation in all contracts we draft or review, in addition to new VAT laws, Qatar’s onshore dispute and blockade, and other political issues’.