About

Led by general counsel Mehmet Celal Savaş, the Turkish legal team of eight at Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, creates value as ‘a real business partner’. As Savaş is part of both the managing and executive board, all strategic decisions have been made with active involvement of the legal team; this includes the most important new investments and transactions such as the sale of six 15MW SGT-400-driven turbo compressor trains to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project. ‘We are independent, work on a trust basis, and act as strong business partners’, says Savaş. When Siemens Turkey was recognised by its parent as a lead country, its legal team was assigned the associated lead country legal team status to cover 25 countries. Having established an executive board for operational and strategic decisions on a country basis, a key future goal of the team is to become a competence centre for international arbitration, having already operated as centre of compliance investigation and managed the process of setting up the compliance function as an internal ‘owner’. In the face political and economic challenges, Savaş suggests the company will rely on its well-established position to overcome the challenges, saying ‘we will celebrate our 160th anniversary in Turkey this year, we are strong against any barriers and crisis. We are a Turkish company with foreign roots and this is accepted well in the market’.