About

OYAK Mining and Metallurgy Group is the largest integrated steel producer in Turkey which includes eight group companies, one of which is Erdemir. All of the Group companies’ legal services are provided by the legal team which is managed by the legal headquarters office located in Istanbul under the responsibility and supervision of group legal director of Erdemir, Cemile Gunes Dinlenmis. The organisation has two legal managers, two senior lawyers and four mid-level lawyers in the legal team working in different locations across Turkey, as well as six paralegals to support the lawyers in Ereğli, İskenderun, Istanbul and Ankara. ‘Our legal department has been re-organised to supply the optimum efficiency. The roles of the legal managers and the senior lawyers became much clearer and thus our legal team’s performance has highly improved’, says Dinlenmis. Some of the most notable cases the department has worked on include assisting İsdemir, one of the Group’s companies, during the process of the transfer of shares from the pre-market trading platform to BIST Star in April 2018. The team have also recently been behind OYAK NYK Ro-Ro Liman İşletmeleri Anonim Şirketi, which is a joint venture between OYAK Denizcilik ve Liman İşletmeleri and Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha of Japan, to build a Ro-Ro port with an investment of US$110m on Erdemir’s real estate property located in the Yarımca Gulf in Kocaeli. Regarding the legal department’s ethos, Dinlenmis had the following to say: ‘Our team culture is based on [working] with a proactive approach and to satisfy our companies with solution-oriented thinking. Our culture has been developed with our experienced and prudent team members’ hard and rapid workings in professional solidarity’.