About

The legal team at Yıldırım Holding is divided into three main sub-teams: corporate and corporate finance, transactional affairs and M&A, and litigation. Iltem Dokurlar manages the entire team as director of legal affairs; Yasar Can Ipek heads the corporate and corporate finance teams; and Peri Bilgic heads the transactional affairs and M&A teams. Basak Cibikci Onder is another notable team member, who is in charge of carrying out Holding-level litigation work and monitoring the carrying out of sub-company level litigation work. She is supported by a paralegal who maintains the software used for litigation, and keeps it up-to-date. A second paralegal is responsible for all the hardcopy execution and copy circulation of corporate and contractual documentation at home and abroad. When asked about the most integral changes of the legal team in the last two years, Dokurlar says, ‘Widening and deepening have been the prevailing concepts’. The team has expanded in terms of headcount and geographical coverage while also increasing their supervision of different layers and work streams of the business. This has entailed better integration among the constituents of the team, leading to the creation of sub-teams at Holding company and operating company levels. Among their most striking transactions have been the acquisition financing of a port portfolio in Portugal, involving eight international banks including EIB, covering five different ports and two Holding company entities of Yıldırım Group with a total ticket size of €300m. Dokurlar led the team of outside counsel and the relevant in-house team on this: ‘What make this transaction unique is probably the abundance of legal and commercial roadblocks we needed to clean-up, the bottlenecks caused by the local legal regulations and hardship of dealing with independent port authorities at once which turned this transaction into a seventeen party financing’. The loan documentation was signed in May 2018, the first utilisation is yet to be made, as parties are still working on the fulfilment of several requests raised by the port authorities.