About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

I have been involved two dawn raids by Turkish Competition Authority (TCA) whereas one of them formed into a full investigation and the other was dismissed by the TCA after it has completed its pre-investigation.

I have completed one acquisition project regarding to a share deal in Turkey.

I am on a litigation process, as representing defendant, regarding a distributor claim of US$50m range.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this?

The main focus will be on full compliance with competition law and TCA requirements and transformation of the business model in cooperation with the business leaders of the company.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

In-house legal teams act as centres of information as they directly work with all business units as well as support functions within the company. Therefore they see the full and bigger picture when it comes to detect the repeating mistakes and defective areas.

I strongly believe that legal departments should be part of the management team and based on this fact their holistic approach should be considered before taking any management decision.

On the other hand, I strongly believe and promote the idea that the team members of legal department should spend their time not only in the office of the legal department but mostly integrate themselves into the business unit that they are serving for. In a constructive business mind set Legal Department’s role is mostly based on the proactive strategies rather than the reactive responses. However we would like to reach and touch the potential problem before it arose. Like Competition Law enacted in 1994 or  Data Privacy Law enacted in 2017 in Turkey. We are volunteers to be the leaders of the transformative change.  We need to design our teams based on the needs of the future.

The business or the function leader should always have in their minds that legal department is a trusted and un-ignorable partner before they take a non-daily decision. It is obvious that the reliability holds the utmost importance.

The business or the function leader should make sure that the legal team is fully informed on the issue and they are and the legal team works arm to arm, they are in the same boat and they should feel comfortable that the legal team always makes their best to make it happen.

What “legal tech” products do you currently utilise, and do you foresee implementing more of these in the near future?

We have been using an electronic system on the archiving and management of the contracts. E-Learning are in place for more than a ten years period.

Have any new laws, regulations or judicial decisions greatly impacted your company’s business or your legal practice?

Yes, we mostly experience these type of effects and changes

What do you feel are the most effective techniques for getting the most out of external counsel, in terms of how to instruct them?

I strongly believe that external counsel should be well informed about the clients structure, business methodology and the targets. The instruction to the external counsel should cover the ultimate goal so that the external counsel should think about it and come up with a possible scenarios and options. On the contrary you may find yourselves limiting a talent (the external counsel)  trying to find the best option for its client.

FOCUS ON: Resale price maintenance

In the beginning of 2019 Turkish Competition Authority (TCA) issued and published two decisions on resale price maintenance (RPM) focusing on the practices carried out by Turkish subsidiaries of two global players.

The decisions are game changers when it comes to the past decisions of TCA Board.

In one of the decision; although the first team of case-handlers of the pre-investigation phase concluded not to initiate a full investigation in their report; TCA Board decided just at the opposite direction and decided to start a full investigation.

Within the context of the same investigation and again, despite new members of the case-handlers’ team concluded their investigation report not to impose any monetary fine, TCA Board disagreed with the conclusion of the report and decided to impose a monetary fine to the respective undertaking.

We noted an important deviation regarding TCA Board’s approach towards RPM where and even the case handlers of TCA had difficulty to adopt with.

In the concrete case, the TCA focused on the two computer programs that helps the undertaking to monitor its end users’ behaviours, resale prices, insert prices, shelf positioning of its own products as well as the parity between resale prices and recommended campaign prices. The TCA clearly stated that having such tools is not a violation in and of itself.

As usual the TCA further investigated the market practices and communications of the respective undertaking and detected that the undertaking is not only monitoring but also communicating and recommending its purchasers to increase their prices, if the resale prices are below the recommended prices.

The game changing point is; in the past TCA constantly applied the effects-based approach and if the respective conduct does not have any negative impact on the market, TCA did not prefer to impose any fine. However as of the beginning of 2019 TCA has sharply changed its approach on RPM and preferred a substantially stringent approach. In new approach of TCA RPM practices constitute a violation “by object” independent from the undertakings’ market share as well as effect of the conduct in the market. However, the effect of the conduct may constitute a parameter to be considered in defining the degree of the penalty.

We must also note that TCA follows the online market and gives very high importance to the restrictions that are targeting the online sales.