About

General counsel, chief compliance officer and corporate secretary Mark Hounsell leads the CAE legal team that is composed of 15 lawyers worldwide, with six located at the company’s head office in Montreal. A staff of 25 additional individuals, including paralegals, contract administrators and assistants support the global legal team with five of the 25 support staff located at the Montreal head office. The CAE global legal team is structured principally by geography, with either a head or director of legal responsible for legal services in each of the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific regions. Maryse Barbeau, associate general counsel, leads the Americas team, overseeing a group of five lawyers supporting CAE activities in Canada, the US and South America. The Americas team also includes director legal Sophie Poirier, director legal. When Hounsell joined CAE in February 2016, the global legal team was flat from an organisational point of view, with all lawyers reporting centrally to the general counsel. Hounsell undertook a restructuring of the team to its geography-based reporting structure and, in order to address CAE’s significant business expansion, added a number of additional non-lawyer resources, including paralegals and contract administrators. CAE legal has recently completed and is currently pursuing a number of impressive strategic transactions, including the November 2017 acquisition of Air Asia’s stake in the Asian Centre of Excellence, for a cash consideration of C$114.8m. As Hounsell identifies, ‘the acquisition allowed CAE to expand its footprint in the fast-growing Asia Pacific aviation market, and further reinforced CAE’s position as the global training partner of choice. 150 employees from three AACE training centres located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam became CAE employees as of closing’. Additionally, the team worked on the establishment of CAE USA Mission Solutions in May 2018, a subsidiary of CAE USA, which operates under a proxy agreement with the US government. The proxy agreement enables Mission Solutions to pursue and execute higher-level security programmes. CAE has also established a joint-venture with Singapore Airlines in August 2018 for pilot training in Singapore. The joint venture will initially focus on providing simulator training for Boeing aircraft types. The team is also currently working on the purchase of Bombardier’s business aviation training (BAT) business for US$645m, an acquisition announced in November 2018 and expected to close in the second half of 2019. The acquisition will expand CAE’s addressable market of customers operating one of the largest and most valuable in-service fleets of business aircraft in the world. In addition to the agreement to acquire Bombardier’s BAT business, CAE has agreed to pay US$155m to monetise its existing future royalty obligations under the current authorised training provider (ATP) agreement with the business jet manufacturer. This also involves the extension of CAE’s ATP agreement to 2038.