About

The legal department at Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company – the sovereign wealth fund of Bahrain – has undergone a major structural overhaul of its previously undocumented processes, in addition to implementing new policies and procedures to regulate the manner in which it handles all aspects of its day-to-day operations. ‘We pride ourselves on the fact that we have developed a specialised legal team, which has the expertise to meet most of the company’s legal needs in-house, therefore reducing the reliance on the appointment of external counsel and reducing unnecessary costs and overheads’ says Aysha Abdulmalek, the company’s head of legal affairs. Comprised of four employees, who are said to perfectly ‘complement each other’s skillset’, the team provides the expertise necessary to service the company’s needs in achieving its strategic objectives and maintaining its obligations towards the government and its sovereign wealth fund status. To ensure implementation of high productivity and best practice methods, the team has worked with the fund’s executive management to produce turn-around times for the most common requests for documentation. ‘These turn-around-times have been communicated to all our colleagues in the company not only to manage their expectations, but also to monitor the quality of the department’s service towards them’, Abdulmalek explains. She also shares that the team implemented an IT platform to act as a ‘call centre’ for all legal services required by any department within the company. In her words: ‘members of staff requiring any legal service, send their request to a designated email linked to the legal services platform. The general counsel then allocates the request to the appropriate member of the legal team, depending on the level of expertise required and workload of team members’. Alongside turn-around times, the platform provides quantifiable measurement of the department’s effectiveness, as well as identifying areas that require specific amendments to processes, thus ensuring that transactions and business requirements are met with accuracy and time efficiency. The platform also enables the team to maintain track of all requests (which the department receives over 100 of per month), ensuring that all work is completed within deadlines. In addition to these internal improvements, the last couple of years were also marked by impressive transactional work. In 2018 the team already supported Mumtalakat’s investment as a limited partner in Al Waha Fund of Funds, successfully closing its $100m funding round, leading to the creation of the first active venture capital fund of funds in the region. The team also assisted with the acquisition of a Class A office campus in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina in partnership with Sentinel Real Estate Investment Corporation. The campus was successfully leased to Lenovo. Last year, the team also assisted on a number of prominent deals, which included: the acquisition of a minority equity stake in a portfolio of 11 industrial warehouse assets in Dubai, the establishment of Bahrain Institute for Pearls and Gemstones (Danat) as a wholly owned subsidiary of Mumtalakat, a partnership with Arcapita, the approximately 90% stake in NAS United Healthcare Services, the acquisition of a significant minority stake in Axtmann Aviation Holding and the physical sale of Mumtalakat’s shares in PRO Unlimite. Impressive members within the team include its leader Abdulmalek, whose role in driving the department forward has been highlighted by nominators and Noor Sharafi ‘a dedicated, hard-working and detail-oriented lawyer’ who is praised for being pro-active in ‘solving any legal issue or concern that she comes across even if the relevant matter is not primarily assigned to her’.