About

AGH’s 17-person legal team oversees a multi-billion dollar operation encompassing around 30 subsidiaries and sister companies worldwide. AGH is a diversified family owned global conglomerate based in Kuwait, focusing on international investments, real estate, oil and gas, infrastructure and civil projects, hotels and hospitality, and consultancy services on government tenders and contracts. To help it to deal with this highly demanding portfolio, chief general counsel and international advisor Mohammed Al Noor explains that the team has undertaken a comprehensive rollout of cutting-edge legal technology over the past couple of years. ‘We have looked into obtaining the latest legal management software designed for in-house legal counsels’ comprehensive needs covering, corporate transactions, documents control, and litigation cases, which allows all levels of legal related operations to see what is happening across the business’, he explains. ‘As our business is no longer national and is now global, we need to know about corporate, M&A deals and investments as soon as they occur so that legal and regulatory compliance units in every jurisdiction including the Middle East can be updated immediately’. This is just as well, as the team has been extremely busy of late with a number of marquee M&A projects, joint ventures and investment transactions. AGH is one of the largest investors in the hotels and hospitality sector, it opened one of the largest hotels in Melbourne, and Al Noor mentions the company’s team has closed a number of mega deals, including contracts on supplying and operating two new-build deep drilling oil rigs for a national oil company.

Further, the Group acquired a number of prime real estate properties in Paris, Berlin and London, providing a healthy volume of cross-border work for Action Group’s in-house team to undertake. In order to successfully support the business and maintain its high standards, the Group retains a strict internal policy on retaining and recruiting legal professionals, which will make it into the Holding Group level legal team, as Al Noor outlines: ‘First of all, we need highly qualified legal professionals who are bilingual or tri lingual and used to multi-jurisdictional complex transactions. As well as this, specialities are very important, as we require lawyers with specialisations in the fields the Group deals with – oil and gas, real estate, hospitality or investments for instance. Finally, we need people who are team workers; as we are relying on specialist skills, we need people who are able to share and relate these to others’.