About

With revenues of more than $14bn a year, GE’s Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (MENAT) division plays an important part in the conglomerate’s global operations. The MENAT legal team has been a big part of this success, working closely with senior management to ensure that the region’s notoriously tricky regulatory, compliance and legal structures do not prevent business progress. As part of this process, the MENAT legal and compliance team was reorganised in 2014 to become a “Centre of Excellence” capable of interacting with and facilitating GE’s numerous business lines across the region. Led by veteran GE senior executive Bruce McAlister, the team of 45 legal and compliance staff is split into five hubs (North Africa, North West Africa, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the Gulf, Levant and Turkey), with senior staff on-the-ground in a number of other jurisdictions. This emphasis on having lawyers embedded in the business while feeding into a single Centre of Excellence has paid dividends for GE, providing it with a joined-up legal and compliance overview possessed by few other multinationals in the region. The team has been involved in some of GE’s most transformational deals and played a key part in its $17bn acquisition of Alstom, which had significant operations in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Not only was the MENAT Centre of Excellence an important facilitator in this extremely tricky transaction, but by taking on a number of Alstom’s regional counsel it helped to ensure a smooth integration of the assets.