About

The highly accomplished and industry leading legal team at Standard Chartered Bank East Africa is led by Patricia Nyokabi Mbugua, regional head of legal, global banking and commercial banking. The team consists of three highly talented lawyers, Jane Chege and Chris Engola Otyek, both senior legal counsel who report to Mbugua in Nairobi. Chege provides dedicated support to the commercial banking (CB) segment while Otyek and Mbugua are the focal points of contact for the global banking business (GB). The team’s primary focus is providing transactional support, in collaboration with legal colleagues in Uganda and Tanzania, to GB and CB business units across East Africa while remaining an integral part of the wider Africa Middle East (AME) legal team, engaging in cross-border matters beyond the East African region. It also regularly advises the recoveries team as well as financial markets (FM), transactional banking (TB), leveraged finance, structuring solutions and loan syndications, risk and control functions in close collaboration with legal colleagues. Individually the team has significant roles above its day-to-day duties. Chege is a trustee of the Standard Chartered Kenya Staff Retirement Benefits Scheme (Pension Fund) following her successful election in 2017, signifying ‘tremendous respect from members of staff and raising the bar for legal beyond the normal mandate’, according to Mbugua. Otyek is the Africa and Middle East representative at the Legal Innovation Forum set up by the Bank’s legal management team to explore initiatives such as contract automation, artificial intelligence, and document management. The Forum aims to improve efficiencies and free up in-house counsel time to do more value-added work, demonstrating the high regard with which he is held within the Bank. Otyek has also been actively involved in industry initiatives such as the Bond Market Steering Committee discussions between the Kenyan banking sector and the Capital Markets Authority resulting in “The Capital Markets Securities Lending Borrowing and Short Selling Regulations 2017”; there is continued stakeholder engagement on the enabling infrastructure that would allow for full implementation of the law. In 2017 Mbugua was appointed to a National Task Force by the Kenyan cabinet secretary of lands and physical planning, to look into the extension and renewal of leasehold titles in Kenya. There she served as the nominated representative of the Kenya Bankers’ Association, deputised the chairperson on a number of occasions and played an instrumental role in finalising the legal aspects of the report and the team’s recommendations, which if implemented would fundamentally streamline the process. Mbugua says, ‘our team is passionately customer-centric, commercially-minded, professional, collaborative, pragmatic, proactive, dedicated, efficient, emotionally intelligent, engaging and solution-oriented; we do not see ourselves as lawyers in the business, but businessmen and businesswomen in the law’.