About

Kuwait Petroleum International (KPI)’s legal team is led by Juan Riancho, general counsel and consists of senior legal manager Mark Pennington, senior legal counsels Julien Bergerat and Mariam Abdullatif Al-Obaid, and legal counsel Ahmad Saber Al-Hindal. The team has recently adapted to new technologies and implemented new processes such as “Legal Manager”, an electronic database system managing the corporate housekeeping, contracts and tax issues of all the KP Group legal entities in a unified and controlled process. Additionally, the team has implemented areas of expertise for in-house lawyers to specialise in specific areas of law thus becoming an in-house reference in such areas by providing advice, workshops, and internal trainings. The team has also worked on major transactions including “Project Oryx” in which KPI signed a sales and purchase agreement in 2017 and a shareholders’ agreement in 2018 with Oman Oil Company. The deal allowed the company to acquire 50% in Duqm Refinery and Petrochemical Industries Company, a project valued at US$6bn to develop and maintain a 230,000 barrels per day green field oil refinery and associate utilities, infrastructure and offsite facilities over a total area of 900 hectares in the Special Economic Zone Authority of Duqm within the Sultanate of Oman. The team also advised on reaching mechanical completion (installation of all required machinery) under project “NSRP”, a project to establish, operate and maintain a 200,000 barrels per day oil refinery and associate utilities in Vietnam. Additionally, the team participates in the firm’s efforts on the project for the divestment of the Europoort refinery in the Netherlands. Within the team, Al-Obaid leads the team and coordinates with legal entities across Europe with the management of electronic tools to maximise effectiveness of corporate housekeeping tasks and better control of legal entities worldwide. On top of that she actively participated in the Oryx and Europoort projects. Bergerat provides substantial support and knowledge in project finance and EPC contracts and provides high quality legal advice and support to the business especially in new projects of the company in Asia including Oryx and NSRP projects. On top of that he is actively following up on the VAT implementation in Kuwait and is part of the team providing workshops internally. The team has recently faced and met the challenge of implementing and training the rest of the firm in the new VAT, GDPR, modern slavery, and whistleblowing policies across Europe and the Gulf states. Bergerat identifies this and says that the team has ‘been working on the globalisation of the legal function in our company progressing to achieve that the various legal departments in the company worldwide work together to ensure coordination at the highest levels, and to ensure that the corporation and our corporate legal department follows up and remains on the same page for the larger and key legal issues of the company’.