Team size: Three

Key team members: Dr Ilham Ramli, Nor Akmar binti Mohd Bidin, Nurul Aidea binti Senin

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Johor Corporation (JCorp) operates in four core sectors; agribusiness, wellness, food and restaurant, and real estate and infrastructure, through its flagship companies; Kulim (Malaysia), KPJ Healthcare, QSR Brands (M) Holdings and Johor Land, with total assets valued at around $7bn. JCorp’s international presence currently spreads across Brunei, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Australia.

With such diverse investment portfolios in different regions, the legal team has been closely involved in critical discussions while evaluating potential deals on multiple listing and M&A transactions in various sectors. We render the support required by anticipating, among others, post-closing issues and resolving them proactively with the structure of the deals.

The legal team also recently played a key role in the success of JCorp’s inaugural Islamic medium-term notes offering of $320.54m based on the Syariah principle of Wakalah Bi Al-Istithmar. This transaction received overwhelming interest from fixed income investors following an oversubscription.

Apart from contributing to the company’s overall investment and growth strategy, the legal team has been instrumental in providing strategic leadership on multimillion-dollar cross-border commercial disputes involving companies within the Group.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?  

At JCorp, the team culture or ethos is well embodied in the shared RITE values. It stands for Real Honour, Innovate for Impact, Team JCorp as One and Excellence Drives Us.

We value the trust placed in us by our stakeholders and uphold our integrity as professionals, take ownership to do the right thing and mean what we say and show courage in difficult situations. While innovating for impact, we remain curious yet brave, adapting quickly to a changing world, are passionate about solving complex challenges and creating new value, and boldly grow the good we want to see in the community.

Team JCorp as one keeps us agile in bringing the best of the group to our stakeholders. We listen to understand and celebrate diversity, and nurture partnerships and meaningful ecosystems. Excellence drives us to set a high bar for performance and make the extraordinary happen; We may not be perfect, but we always learn from our experiences and constantly improve.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

At JCorp, the legal team works closely with the chief governance officer and the group governance and risk division in setting out a framework of principles on risk governance to guide the board and senior management in performing their risk oversight function.

We keep the respective parties abreast of the latest legal and regulatory obligations so that the existing applicable compliance management policy and enterprise risk management framework remain current.