About

Led for many years by legal and compliance manager Lorenzo Bruttomesso, the Oman Oil Refineries and Petroleum Industries Company (Orpic) legal team moves onto a new chapter in 2018 as he moves to pastures new in July, to be succeeded by new GC Elina Mohamed. Mohamed was formerly the group legal adviser of a Malaysian conglomerate, with three core businesses in engineering and construction, energy and utilities and ports and logistics. Orpic’s legal and compliance team currently comprises five individuals, excluding a dedicated compliance officer role which is expected to be added by late 2018; this allows the team greater effectiveness in dealing with expanded compliance requirements. Over the past two years, the Orpic team has supported the company in some extremely high-profile and high-value projects that are of major impact to the region.

The Muscat Sohar Pipeline Project is just one example of this. It will connect Orpic’s Mina Al Fahal and Suhar refineries to a distribution and storage centre at Jifnain via a 280km pipeline that will be the first of its kind in Oman; it is a multi-product pipeline that will allow the company to dispense with its truck-based oil haulage fleet, which is projected to reduce heavy fuel truck transport in Muscat by 70%. Alongside this, the team joined the rest of Orpic in celebrating the completion of the company’s Sohar Refinery Improvement Project in February of 2018, and played a major role in the Raysut Oil Terminal revamp project.

In 2018, the legal and compliance team has spent much of its time on the expansion of subsidiary OPM’s business of polymer sale via the setting up and proposed set up of various corporate presence in Singapore, China, India and Turkey. Additionally, the claims work on the Liwa Plastics project (LPIC) has started to kick off and early management of claims is always essential for good project management. This is where the legal and compliance team add value. Any successful legal team is built on the individual qualities of the lawyers within, and ORPIC is no exception.

Mashael Yaseen and assistant legal counsel Mohammed Said Al Busaidi as worthy of particular praise, the former for being ‘very dependable’ and for ‘impressive management in her contribution of the various financing transactions and as Board Secretary of Orpic Logistics’, and the latter for his involvement in ‘a number of the larger strategic transactions which will be essential for Orpic’s increase in market share in a number of sectors in the years to come’.