About

Described by regional CEO Sunil Kaushal as ‘instrumental to our continued success in building sustainable business growth across the region’, Standard Chartered’s Middle East legal team is a true partner to the business. Led by former Norton Rose Fulbright partner Karl Rogers, the team covers 25 countries across Africa and the Middle East (AME) and comprises approximately ninety professionals within the regional function, collectively providing expertise to both advise and support the front office teams and play a key part in the governance of the bank’s business. The regional general counsel explains that his team have enhanced their value-add by cross training and by adopting a number of process improvements in recent months to improve collective efficiency: ‘Development of our team members is a priority to us, whether by exposure to new types of work or experience in a different country in our network. By collaborating and pulling together as a team, despite the geographic challenges we face, our collective capacity and efficiency has increased. We have also undertaken an extensive review of our external legal panels with our colleagues in the COO legal office, which has reduced the number of panel law firms across AME region by 60%. As a result, we can build upon our relationships with the remaining panel firms and mitigate the compliance and governance risks inherent in dealing with third party suppliers’. Nominees also mentioned Simon Bugingo, head of lgal, global and commercial banking, as highly respected among the Middle East’s in-house legal community. Head of governance legal Lyn-Si Fisher and director of risk and policy legal Paul Wafula were singled out for having made particularly strong contributions the team’s work and direction. Fisher is described as having ‘a wide and strategic role “double-hatting”’ to cover legal matters that fall outside of the global and commercial banking space (i.e. governance, investigations and commercial contracts), as well as managing lawyers based in Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar and the UAE and additional jurisdictions where no lawyers are present in country being Iraq, Oman, Saudi, Lebanon and Egypt. Wafula is described as having ‘been critical in embedding our operational risk framework and focusing our lawyers’ attention to regulatory and reputational operational risk matters that can arise in our day to day work, which is a key priority for both regulators and the Bank’.