About

As a shareholding of Volkswagen Financial Services and Doğuş group companies in Turkey, Volkswagen Doğuş Finans (VDF) and its group companies operate in a variety of business areas such as finance, factoring, insurance, operational leasing and services. All members of the VDF legal and compliance team directly report to Mehmet Tekergül, a legal and compliance manager with extensive experience, and the team consists of five in-house professionals with highly diverse skillsets. The team provides legal and compliance support, consultancy and services to all VDF group companies and their respective departments. Tekergül highlights that, ‘all members of our team operate individually as well as co-operatively with utmost performance’. He supervises and provides guidance for all operations of his team and also represents VDF group companies as an attorney, monitors the efficiency of the contracted legal offices to protect the best interests of VDF and ensures proper follow-up of the changes in the regulatory landscape. Legal counsel Naz Sümer practices as an attorney for all VDF group companies and operates general assembly meetings and other corporate secretary processes. She also represents VDF group companies before public institutions and civil associations by attending working groups and meetings. Additionally, she helps with VDF group companies through reviewing contracts signed with third party service providers and customers. Erkan Özcan, compliance officer, has accounting, auditing, compliance and information technologies experience in his professional and educational background. He is responsible for the management and performance of all compliance processes in VDF group. To this end, Özcan works to increase the awareness about various external or internal regulatory requirements with internal communications and organising the preparation of necessary procedures, trainings and controls. He is also the official compliance officer of VDF Finance for local AML regulations and currently designated as the contact person (data protection officer) of all VDF entities from the view of data protection requirements. Çağlar Akdağ, legal operations senior supervisor, is specialised in the areas of execution processes and pledge proceedings. Within his role he manages the official communications with judicial and administrative authorities, and triggers the coordination of related service providers. Furthermore, Akdağ liaises with the contracted legal offices for litigation, collection and execution processes and diligently monitors and reports legal expenses of the company. The team led the company’s project to establish necessary measures and procedures to ensure compliance with Law No.6698 on personal data protection. Tekergül identified that one of the major challenges of the project was making preparations for five different companies with different areas of activities. ‘Within the scope of the project; for all entities and departments, personal data processing inventories and process evaluations were completed, procedures were created, information texts were drafted and process improvements were made’. Additionally, he highlighted that the team ‘communicates with all its parties while performing its duties and approach issues by considering both the business needs and fast changing legal requirements in the country’.