About

Karadeniz Holding is a major energy production holding company operating in 16 countries across the globe and is a major innovator in the power generation industry thanks to its production and operation of the world’s first powerships. Legal director Nazlı Dereli Oba is the leader of the eight lawyer legal team with members located in Jakarta, Dubai and Istanbul. Faris Sahra, based in Dubai, is the Powership legal coordinator, and is responsible for managing the team in Oba’s absence. Faris leads the powership projects that are based in the Middle East and Asia as well as finance projects and new gas power projects. Arda Gurata leads the powership projects in Africa and Latin America and is also responsible for litigation. İdil Haliloglu is the team’s shipping and maritime expert that deals with ship purchases, shipyards, maritime issues as well as ship financings. Ayse Unal is responsible for general legal advice and contract drafting, mostly working with procurement and finance departments. The team includes two junior lawyers – Selcuk Aydın and Sıla Uysal – and Dwi Ayunda Sahar is its lawyer based in Jakarta who is responsible for assisting the company in all legal matters in Indonesia. Karadeniz Holding works in various jurisdictions, and all members of the legal team travel to all those locations, and are required to have an understanding of the legal environment in all jurisdiction that the company operates in, from the Gambia to Lebanon. Oba highlights that, ‘finding the right local lawyers and understanding the legal system of new jurisdictions is one of the biggest challenges of our team. Secondly, in order to make sure that our investment is protected by the best international treaties that are available, structuring becomes another important subject’. The legal team works together with the tax and finance departments for each location in order to create the most suitable corporate and legal structure for each jurisdiction. In August 2017, the company was awarded over US$800m by an ICSID Tribunal, the third biggest ICSID award ever rendered, in an arbitration case against the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In 2018, the team executed power purchase agreements with The Gambia, Sierra Leone and Sudan, and has already started commercial operations in those countries. The company is currently looking into further projects in Latin America, which is expected to be a new challenge for the team. Oba continues, ‘the amount of work that we handle and the number of jurisdictions that we work in is massive especially given the number of team members that we have. Therefore, I would say for us, the most important [thing] is being flexible, being diverse and open to challenges’.