About

At BAT Turkey, Ceren Kartari is the head of legal for the Turkey-North Africa (TNA) area and, in this capacity, she leads the legal team of five lawyers and a paralegal advising the executive management of the TNA area office legal and external affairs department in Istanbul. She covers all legal and compliance matters and directs and supports the legal departments in Turkey, North Cyprus, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. The other team members comprising the team are senior legal counsel and specialist in commercial and compliance matters Burcu Karakurt, corporate legal counsel Yiğit Ozses, commercial legal counsel Salih Gucyilmaz, assistant legal counsel Balamir Dizdar and paralegal Nazan Bașkaya. In April 2017, the Turkey-North Cyprus cluster and the North African cluster (Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Libya) were merged to constitute the TNA area under the Europe-North Africa (ENA) region. Accordingly, and without any increase in numbers, the legal team started working on North Africa deals as well, functioning as a bridge between the central functions in London, on top of their daily routine in Turkey and North Cyprus. Kartari identifies that, ‘this led to a significant diversification as well as increase in workload; it allowed the team members to gain precious experience on driving global projects’. Since early 2018, BAT Turkey’s external affairs and legal departments were merged under the single department, LEX. This was the final stage of the global restructuring, ensuring a robust function which includes all aspects of legal, external affairs, corporate communication and compliance. Kartari explains that, ‘this structure eases the transfer of valuable experience internally to create fully rounded legal and corporate affairs professionals and permits the legal teams to train themselves in various areas in the function’. Kartari continues that, ‘in a highly regulated and ever evolving sector such as tobacco, it is very important to ensure that legal teams know how external affairs are conducted, can produce effective communication documents and are in charge of delivering compliance programmes with their business partners’.