About

The Oando Group is Nigeria’s largest independent conglomerate in the energy industry, and the first Nigerian company to achieve a dual listing on both the Nigerian and Johannesburg Stock Exchanges. Ngozi Okonkwo, chief legal officer, has ensured that the legal support of the company has been constant over the years, allowing Oando to expand its operations. For example, the team is recognised for its active involvement in the July 2014 acquisition of three ConocoPhillips’ business entities in Nigeria for a net purchase price of $1.5bn.

In addition to working on the three share sale and purchase agreements for the acquisition, the team was also actively involved in the financing for the acquisitions. This involved a $450m reserves-based lending facility, a $350m corporate facility, a $100m subordinated facility and convertible note purchase facilities. Okonkwo’s team also worked on the completion of the partial divestment of downstream divisions to the Helios/Vitol consortium. This transaction involved complex financial arrangements involving debt investment by the Helios/Vitol consortium and the restructuring of existing debt to achieve a $440m reduction in group debt. The team went on to complete the restructuring of a $450m reserves based lending facility to pay off the $100m subordinated facility and the execution of a $115m share sale and purchase agreement for the partial divestment of the remainder of its gas and power division. In addition to the team’s legal expertise, important technical innovations have also been implemented and have already revolutionised the department’s work; one example is the “Litigation Management Software”. ‘This is an offline platform that serves as a one-stop paperless database for all files on litigation cases instituted by or against the entities within the Oando Group’, Ngozi Okonkwo says. The software ‘is aimed at increasing the efficiency of our legal document management, storage and retrieval system thereby reducing the volume of case files stored in the cabinet and aiding quick access to information on litigation cases’.

Another innovation implemented by the team is the ‘legal timeline tracker’, an online software solution that provides for the efficient and effective management of the Oando legal team’s day-to-day affairs. ‘It serves the main purpose of keeping the team abreast of all time bound obligations and conditions precedent thereby ensuring that they are completed in a timely fashion. Tasks and obligations are set and assigned to the relevant parties, reminders and alerts are sent out at pre-defined intervals. As lawyers, we deal with a lot of facts, details and information. This can be both overwhelming and complex. The legal timeline tracker tackles this complexity by bringing order to the flood of information. It helps in reducing clutter, keeping the team organised and on top of things’, says Ngozi Okonkwo.