About

Joining the Bank in 2013 as head of legal affairs, Elsamawal A. Idris was the Sohar International Bank’s only in-house legal resource for a time. ‘This helped me push boundaries, learn very quickly and deliver on a very rich variety of matters in a jurisdiction and a legal system that was totally new to me’, he says of this important period of his career. Since then, Idris has built and developed a highly effective legal department for the Bank, based around Idris’s ‘can-do approach’. This ambition has been well-valued by the Bank. ‘Our extremely strong legal department provides a full range of legal services, at high standards of quality, to the Bank’, he says. ‘This, along with the personal skills and expertise demonstrated, convinced management of the Bank to give me more responsibilities beyond purely legal ones, such as being in charge of the compliance department for two years in addition to my other responsibilities. The trust in myself by the organisation was confirmed again when I received the responsibilities of board secretary in addition to those of head of legal affairs’. Just some of the most notable projects Idris has overseen include major syndicated facilities and legal due diligence on a financial institution.