About

Before its establishment until 2002, GAMA Energy was a division under GAMA Holding without any actual organisational structure. It was 2008 when the company carried out it its first project and in 2012, Aybars Yağız, legal counsel, joined the company as its first in-house lawyer and started to build up a legal team comprising of both in-house and external lawyers. The department slowly increased in number to two additional in-house lawyers, Yuksel Temizer Sanlıdilek and Hazal Mina Kangal, and six contracted external lawyers. The in-house team is responsible for GAMA Energy’s nine domestic and three foreign subsidiaries as well as the company’s own legal work. Yağız identifies that the team’s main concern is to ‘establish a compliance procedure, adopt legal and commercial precautions and design plain contracts for a smooth operation. For this purpose any contract, undertaking or even critical communications shall be signed-off by the legal team’. This practice has rewarded the team by reducing the number of disputes. External counsel are usually assigned to one project or one subsidiary for litigation type work reporting to the in-house team. The in-house team has created contract templates for every occasion which has helped prevent problems and enabled the team to work collaboratively on more complex matters and still keeps ‘the wheels turning’ according to Yağız. In the last two years the team has completed six multimillion dollar company acquisitions involving US, Malaysian and Turkish counterparties, the privatisation of two energy assets, managed five big project financing deals, and won a series of administrative suits to avoid one of the subsidiaries from winding up and ceasing operation. These diverse transactions have enhanced the team’s time management skills and teamwork. Yağız highlights that the team ‘values setting the appropriate context rather than trying to control the people. This virtue can be achieved with some difficulty. First, we need to be open for criticism and, even harder, to criticise constructively. Then, all our sources shall be open to the team and shared when needed. Improvement and harmony will follow automatically…we’ve built a reliable bond and everything is handled smoothly’.