About

The Swire Pacific Offshore group is a leading service provider to the offshore energy industry, with a fleet of more than 80 vessels operating worldwide. Headquartered in Singapore, Swire Pacific Offshore and its subsidiaries have multiple regional and country offices across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The company’s legal team is led by general counsel Kenneth Ho who joined in 2008. Describing his team, Ho says: ‘The team is very lean and consists of three lawyers, including talented and driven young counsel Mabel Leong and Wong Kang Lin. Based in the Singapore head office, this compact team provides legal support to all of the Swire Pacific Offshore group’s business units across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In addition the legal team also provides support to the China Navigation group which operates a fleet of more than 60 multipurpose, container and bulk carrier vessels’. Each team member has personal ownership of a different portfolio and services a different group of internal clients, which encourages close engagement with the business at both the strategic and operational levels. Whilst Leong is generally responsible for supporting the marine services division as well as special projects, Kang Lin is generally responsible for supporting the China Navigation group. ‘The small size of the legal team and our comparatively wide mandate mean that in order to succeed, every team member must at all times exercise a high degree of initiative, commercial awareness, and the ability to punch above his/her PQE’, explains Ho. With the recent downturn in the oil and gas industry, the legal team gained internal recognition for quickly adapting to the challenge of the company’s clients and contractors slashing their capital expenditure, headcount and contract spend. Another key achievement of the team was dealing with Cabotage and other regulatory requirements in the jurisdictions Swire operate in: ‘Legal has become heavily involved in risk management and compliance in order to help the organisation keep pace with regulatory changes. As a team, we have developed and implemented policies and compliance processes relating to key areas such as sanctions, data privacy, anti-corruption and anti-competition. The team also provides ongoing support to various strategic projects such as the fleet renewal program’, says Ho. Firm believers in the Swire Pacific Offshore vision (‘excellence in every operation, every time, everywhere’), the department’s internal clients around the globe know that they can depend on the legal team to deliver exactly what the business needs on time.