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Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) is a major natural gas pipeline project worth $11bn. The pipeline has been given high importance politically by Turkey, Azerbaijan and European countries that the line is extending to. The TANAP legal team of three is led by legal affairs director Zeynep Gazali Yılmazer, who has ensured TANAP has become a self-contained company on legal matters with little outsourced legal work. After making senior management aware of the importance of having an internal legal affairs department, all commercial, corporate and project contracts, which total approximately $11bn, are now being led by the legal team. The team creates a negotiation team before attending contract talks, determining the strategy during the negotiations. Yılmazer says, ‘all the contracts signed by TANAP are tailor-made by the in-house legal team with the inclusion of the technical know-how by relevant department. The team has taken the role of drafting specific contracts for each subject under TANAP, and in this manner the engineering-procurement and construction contracts signed were prepared by the leadership of the TANAP legal team’. Notable achievements of the legal affairs department include preparing many internal policies to create a valuable corporate attitude, obtaining tax returns from vendors and contractors following a regulation that exempted the company from paying VAT, submitting a detailed and successful objection to an investigation on hot bends which were crucial to the project in 2015 and clarifying the requirements under the Turkish legislation on the foreign shareholders.