About

Saudi Arabia is the Middle East’s fastest-growing electricity consumer, and the entire industry is undergoing dramatic regulatory reform. As the legal head of KSA’s primary provider, Mutlaq Al-Mutlaq is a respected industry expert. He represented SEC in the government’s reform committee on electricity law, and took on the mammoth task of updating the company’s entire regulatory framework. ‘SEC is undergoing huge changes in implementing a restructuring program according to government policies for establishing a competitive electricity market in the Kingdom’. With overall control of around 70 legal personnel split across four regional departments, Al-Mutlaq has made performance optimisation a core focus throughout his tenure, with an emphasis on greater business involvement. ‘We in the Saudi Electricity Company legal team believe the role of the in-house legal counsel is no longer confined to handling traditional roles of providing legal services or giving legal support after things have gone wrong’, he says. ‘The role should be more positive and proactive and add real value to the company by engaging, at early stages, in commercial, operational matters as well as strategic decisions’. As far as outside counsel goes, Al-Mutlaq feels foreign firms have an important part to play in Saudi Arabia’s evolving legal framework. ‘The legal regime in the Gulf Region generally – and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia especially – is unique’, he says. ‘Whereas Sharia principles have been the paramount body of law, I would like to see international law firms take a leading role in developing comparative studies between Islamic jurisprudence and conventional law in the fields of commercial, corporate and securities matters’.