About

Chief legal and compliance officer of Qatar Airways Group Ben Swagerman (a GC Powerlist: Middle East 2017-featured lawyer) has grown the company’s legal, risk and compliance (LRC) department from a single luminous member to a ‘robust, collaborative, interdisciplinary and interdepartmental team’ of 13 members in under two years which now ‘impacts every aspect of the business with ceaseless support’, according to one of three senior legal specialists supporting the LRC department, Sonya Shaykhoun. The LRC team’s major successes during this time are many and varied, filling a compliance vacuum that was not there before Swagerman’s arrival. Shaykhoun mentions three successfully completed projects, led by Swagerman, as among the team’s best work: ‘Firstly, the development and implementation of meaningful compliance policies aligned with global best practices; secondly, the ongoing development of new policies, including anti-money laundering, anti-child labour, human trafficking and data protection; and thirdly, the establishment, oversight and guidance on the implementation of GDPR across the Qatar Airways Group’. In addition, the team has been heavily involved with corporate social responsibility surveys, gathering information from across the business, to ensure the group is in line with international standards. Alongside Swagerman and Shaykhoun, key team members who are also permanent members of the contracts department, include senior legal specialists Nadia Salem and Daniella Sankar, the former notable for writing the Qatar Airways Group anti-bribery, anti-corruption and anti-human trafficking policies, and the latter for supporting Qatar Airways Group’s data protection efforts. Marlene van Brummelen is data protection manager, in charge of providing specialist data protection expertise to the team, while Shaykhoun has completed 14 years in the Gulf, working at notable companies such as Al Jazeera Media Network.