About

United Energy Group (UEG) is a multi-national Beijing headquartered oil and gas company expanding rapidly in the Middle Eastern energy market through its operations in Pakistan. The stellar in-house legal team has helped this transformation and continues to make a major impact on the fortunes of this highly successful enterprise. The team is led by Leslie Zhang Weihua, general counsel of UEG and consists of highly experienced senior lawyers with significant oil and gas experience. In the last two years, the team has adopted a centralised management approach where all legal resources are mobilised and allocated by the general counsel with the legal team in Beijing being the primary team. As well as authorising expenses and signing umbrella agreements with panel firms to reduce expenditure on external counsel, the Chinese team supervises the legal team based in Pakistan and the compliance focused legal team in Hong Kong. In total, UEG has ten in-house counsel and two support staff on a contractor basis. Recently the overall legal team has been involved in several major deals for the expanding company including the acquisition of AERD for US$80m; the acquisition of OMV Pakistan petroleum value at US$200m, and the acquisition of Kuwait Energy Group (KEC) for US$900m. On this last deal, Zhang says, ‘[it is] obviously a transformative deal for United Energy Group. Such a deal will transform the business into a medium-sized international independent oil and gas company with a diversified portfolio of assets, while further expanding its development potential’. The team has recently been involved in more than US$1bn in M&A deals in oil and gas and the settlement with a claimant in an international arbitration. The global legal team is working seamlessly across jurisdictions to provide support each other with an ethic of ‘working as a team and [thinking] commercially’.