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

Due to Turkey’s unstable and fluid financial environment, I had to participate in many restructuring transactions over the past year. In many project finance transactions, the actual cash-flows of the borrowers, as a core source for repayment, have drastically deviated from their initial projections due to the economic instability, and this has led to many cases where the borrowers contractually defaulted their obligations and thus to a significant number of restructuring and rescheduling deals.

Additionally, over the past year, Turkish regulatory banking authorities have frequently put into effect new regulations to stabilise and regulate the market, and such regulations also had considerable altering effects on banking transactions, creating an unforeseeable environment for new investments, and decreasing the appetite of the investors for recent transactions. In short, witnessing the financial market turbulence due to the changing circumstances was among the biggest challenges of the past year.

Can you outline your role in the legal function of your organisation and any significant cases or transactions you were involved in?

I am the deputy managing legal counsel of Akbank’s legal department handling legal affairs for project finance, international banking, sustainable financing and treasury matters. I am primarily responsible for providing legal advice and performing advisory, transactional and documentation-related legal work in respect of a broad range of complex financing matters and issues concerning numerous departments in Akbank and its affiliates, covering a broad spectrum of financing transactions, including structured finance, bank-to-bank lending, acquisition finance, asset and project financing, debt and equity capital markets issuances by financial institutions, as well as securitisations. As a member of this very specific legal team, our primary purpose is to provide legal assistance to the legal affairs of the bank, as our primary client and to follow up on the evolving environment of banking regulations and adjust those to the bank’s legal and commercial practices, provide legal alerts and analysis to bank’s commercial departments for the mitigation and prevention of any possible legal risks.

Central to my role as a deputy managing counsel is finding the most suitable legal structures and workable legal solutions acceptable to the bank, counterparties, and all other stakeholders in our transactions, with a perspective of upholding Akbank’s policies and principles generally applicable to all business dealings.

Apart from major transactions that Akbank took the park over the past year, I represented Akbank before financial regulatory bodies as well as other administrative bodies engaged in the transactions, actively involved in working groups within the Banks Association of Turkey (including the representation thereof before governmental authorities) and accordingly built strong relationships with sector professionals in various public and private business fields and led compliance projects arising from the local and international regulatory and practice-related changes and developments, including those in respect of the IBOR transition, implementation of TLREF and the secondary regulations BSRA and CBRT.

In the past year, we have commenced an important internal project to standardise the documentation for loans and securities in bilateral loan transactions of project finance deals. For this purpose, we are currently working on formalising legal templates of the transaction documents to maintain the integrity of documentation that will be used and negotiated in our deals.

I am also responsible for selecting and managing external local and foreign law firms in the bank’s panel and monitoring, supervising, and instructing the appointed firms during the engagement process and in the transactions and evaluating their performances.

Apart from my professional achievement, I have taken profound steps to deepen my academic background, which profoundly supports my professional career. As a financing legal counsel, I believe that a multi-disciplinary approach to applying law will enable me to provide more excellent value within my organisation. While participating in the significant financing transactions in Türkiye, I was privileged to be involved in significant professional opportunities that helped me build a substantial foundation. My awareness and knowledge of core business and finance issues have increased exponentially. But I was still looking to develop my capabilities, focusing on gaining a deeper understanding of business practices and developing my skills in essential financial and management tools that would allow me to serve my clients better and increase the value of their business. Bearing this in mind, I have applied to Sabancı University Executive MBA Programme, welcomed with the scholarship granted by Akbank and Akbank Akademi and graduated in October 2022.

As an academician pursuing a PhD in Private Law at Istanbul University, I am currently working on completing my thesis on “The Pledge over the Shares of the Turkish Joint Stock Companies’ to be discussed before the thesis committee by the end of this June.