About

Fajr Capital Group is a sovereign-backed private equity firm with a diverse portfolio operating across Islamic cooperation markets, and whose legal and corporate affairs department is led by Zahid Kamal, managing director, head of legal and corporate affairs. Kamal brings his fifteen years’ experience in public and private company transactions in the UK and MENA, including private equity, M&A, public takeovers, IPOs, investment funds, secondary offerings, restructurings and joint ventures.

The legal and corporate affairs department comprises of two lawyers, Ben Sautelle-Smith, associate director and senior legal counsel with over nine years of experience, and a trainee solicitor, Lara Dajani. Headquartered in the Dubai International Financial Centre, Fajr Capital Group is backed by the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia, as well as private investors from the GCC and beyond. Over recent years, Fajr Capital Group has won multiple global accolades and industry recognition for originating, structuring and closing the most high-profile and significant private equity investments in the MENA region.

One of the major organisational changes within the last two years was to register the firm as an ‘authorised training provider’ with the UK Solicitors Regulation Authority. This has allowed the team to internally develop a trainee lawyer under a two year training contract to become a fully qualified English and Welsh law solicitor equivalent to the traditional training contract at an English law firm. On this, Kamal says: ‘We believe this is a rare step among financial services firms within the MENA region and one which we are very proud of. The team has very high standards of execution and we have been consistently underwhelmed with the junior resources we have seen at many international law firms. This programme allows us to develop a junior lawyer with exactly the right attributes and performance level for the firm. This has required a significant time commitment from senior team members, but this investment has been well worth it’.

The legal department is deeply integrated into all investment and divestment transactions and portfolio management activities across the group. Within the last two years, the team worked on the firm’s exit from National Petroleum Services of Nesr Corp, a Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition vehicle and portfolio company, in a transaction valued over US$1.1bn. The legal team took the lead in negotiating and executing this complex transaction involving multiple consortium partners, a Nasdaq “De-SPAC” process and a related business combination transaction. The deal resulting in Fajr Capital Group achieving a double money-on-money return within four years of investment.

Another notable transaction among many was the merger of Tamar Energy and Biogen Group, during which the legal team negotiated this transaction on behalf of the existing shareholders of Tamar Energy, a portfolio company. The transaction also involved a complex rollover structure into the combined entity taking account of numerous investor requirements and UK tax drivers.