Team size: Three

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

We have refinanced the whole generation portfolio of the energy group with four banks, one of them being EBRD, for a credit line of $282m. Considering the current financial position of the country, such refinancing was quite challenging. The loan was being utilised by the parent company and the existing loans were at the SPV level. Therefore, the refinancing was also challenging in terms of structuring the deal and establishment of securities. The loan included the refinancing of project finance and acquisition finance which is already quite controversial taking into account existing legal restrictions.

In your opinion, what areas should in-house lawyers focus on over the next few years to prove value to their organisations in Türkiye?

Sustainability. This is a quite fancy word nowadays but not without reason. The legal teams, as well as other departments, should establish guidelines, procedures and work systems that operate successfully. From a legal perspective, standardisation of the agreements, establishing good corporate governance practices, and having appropriate acceleration mechanisms for commercial matters in place would increase efficiency within the corporations. While establishing such mechanisms, the size of the company and shareholders’ expectations should also be taken into consideration; one should not forget that, while we consider good examples of other corporations, each company is unique and would need tailor made solutions.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

We prepared a document called “limits of authorisation” which indicated general provisions of our standard contracts and, in this document, we indicated the authorisation levels of managers, directors and board members for deciding on matters objected by the counter parties. Depending on the issue to be determined (its importance and the value at risk), we put in place appropriate acceleration mechanisms to decide whether to accept counter party’s proposal. We have worked more than six months on finalising the document and it also required other departments’ input since it included many financial and commercial issues raised during the negotiations (for example, whether to request performance bond from the counter party). Since we did not use external resources for this work, the only cost was the time spent by us. The document is yet to be published within the company; however, we have already unofficially started its implementation, and we believe this will serve as a serious guideline for all the company to know their limits of authorisation and speed-up the negotiation processes, thus efficiency.