About

The Tüpraş legal team of six highly skilled and qualified lawyers optimises the expertise of each team member and ensures proficiency, efficiency and harmony within the legal department. In the last two years, the legal department has been reorganised and heavily involved with the other departments of Tüpraş in pursuing significant projects and transactions, whilst providing business-oriented legal advice to relevant departments. Chief legal officer Can Akçaoğlu supports Tüpraş through its timely, accurate and business oriented legal advice, mainly relating to his specialities of corporate and commercial law, energy law, competition law, legal compliance, and insurance law. His team includes Zeynep Düzgören, whose main responsibilities include financing transactions and reviewing contracts on a wide range of topics. Her particular focus is on loan and derivative agreements, and engineering and EPC agreements. Fatma Devrim gives consultancy and litigation services on laws relating to competition, personal data protection, energy and taxation as well as administrative and procedural law. Çınar Alçınar is responsible for labour law matters and Dilara Yürekli Öztuna covers IP matters assisting all legal issues arising with respect to innovation programmes and commercial litigation. Varol Badem joined Tüpraş’ legal team in 1998 and is responsible for employment litigation, tax litigation, administrative proceedings and customs litigation. Doğan Akyol also joined Tüpraş’ legal team in 1998 and is currently responsible of employment litigation, tax litigation, and administrative proceedings. Recent team highlights include its negotiation of loan documentation with IFC, a major Eurobond issuance of over US$100m in October 2017 and the drafting of new templates for engineering and EPC contracts and negotiations. Continuing to demonstrate the innovative qualities which led to it previously featuring in the GC Powerlist: Turkey series, the legal team has implemented a new digital legal portal project transforming its case handling, contract filing and other legal service achievements. Akçaoğlu identifies that this portal ‘enables the legal department to produce legal reports to the accounting department. The goal is to extend the portal to cover contracts management and operate as a legal opinion database in the future. The portal is intended to create efficiency and constitute electronic archive of data and knowledge for the legal department. This would help us to accumulate corporate knowledge in the legal department’.