Legal Business talks to lawyers on the frontline of the controversial and risky oil and gas business to explore the industry trends and challenges in-house legal teams face
2010 was arguably a turning point in the $5trn global energy market. That was the year that Brazilian oil giant Petrobras undertook a record-shattering $70bn equity offering ahead of unveiling a $224bn investment plan, on some measures the largest corporate spending programme the world has ever seen.
This period marked probably the high point of the surging confidence in emerging economies and illustrated the dramatic shift in influence from the western ‘super majors’ that have utterly dominated the global energy market for more than 100 years in favour of state-backed energy giants. Petrobras was expected to profit from huge oil reserves found several years previously buried deep beneath the sea bed off the coast of Brazil.
Given the surging global demand for oil driven by emerging economies in general and China in particular, it seemed the future was burning bright for Petrobras and its global counterparts.
Step forward to 2014 and it hasn’t been quite that simple. ‘The technical complexities and challenges are equal if not more than putting a man on the moon,’ says one general counsel (GC) at a major oil and gas corporation of the difficulties of extracting oil from beneath 2km of water and pre-salt along the coastline of five states.
In pursuing the competing goals of its controlling shareholder, the Brazilian government, which has prevented Petrobras from selling petrol and diesel at market prices – a subsidy aimed at holding inflation in check – while pushing the company to boost investment, the company has seen profits yo-yo since the first quarter of 2012, while its debts have ballooned to over $100bn.
The struggles faced by Petrobras reflect a turbulent and complex environment facing major oil and gas companies, as a sector forced to operate across challenging environments, geographically, politically and legislatively.
And while rising demand for energy is unquestionable, the dynamics in oil and gas markets continue to shift, as key emerging economies continue to slow and have begun to start addressing heavy pollution, an issue that has forcibly shot up the political agenda in China over the last two years.
Nevertheless, the oil and gas industry has seen double-digit annual percentage growth since 2009 and remains one of the most active M&A sectors, constituting $337bn in value across nearly 1,400 transactions last year, according to research from EY.
Elsewhere, energy markets continue to flux as new reserves come on tap, reflecting dramatically rising estimates of gas reserves, while western majors have increasingly pushed into complex and risk-prone joint ventures with national players.
If the energy business has always been turbulent, never has it been so closely regulated – a burden that has given birth to some of the best resourced, most pragmatic and technically adept corporate legal teams built in any industry sector.
Massimo Mantovani, GC at Italian energy giant Eni, comments on the rising expectation resting on his team: ‘You’re in a very high-risk activity considering the energy sector operates in 80 countries in the world. Things may happen and the company has to make the effort to mitigate the risk of running into cases, which is a saving for the company.’
In the first of a series of industry focuses for Legal Business, we assess the key themes facing oil and gas lawyers and how GCs in the sector are moving to respond.
Resource nationalism, for good and ill
The turbulent recent history of Petrobras underlines the dramatic rise over the last 20 years of a new breed of state-backed concern and the related emergence of ‘resource nationalism’. As one oil and gas GC comments: ‘We have seen a shift away from large integrated oil and gas companies to a greater dominance by national oil companies (NOCs) as local governments act in order to gain greater benefit for local industry from its natural resources.’
According to a report published in June 2013 by PwC on global market capitalisation, while the oil and gas industry top five is still dominated by the large internationals, China’s biggest oil producer PetroChina comes second to ExxonMobil, and Colombia’s largest petroleum company Ecopetrol, through rapid growth since 2008, has raced ahead of super major Total to take the sixth spot on the oil and gas rankings. Total, meanwhile, drops 30 places on the overall global company rankings, after losing $65bn of market share since 2008.
ConocoPhillips too has lost its hold, sliding 49 places down overall global rankings since 2008 to 94th in 2013, and losing $46bn of market share.
After Total, Petrobras takes seventh spot as China Petroleum and Russia’s Gazprom take eight and ninth respectively.
Resource nationalism can range from outright expropriation, most notably in the controversial 2012 seizure of Spanish-owned Repsol’s controlling stake in YPF – the nation’s largest crude producer – by the Argentinian government, but it usually comes in more subtle forms, such as higher taxation or tougher regulation. This is on the increase in east African countries, including Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to a report by risk consultancy Maplecroft.
The stance of countries like Russia and China in forging state-backed energy giants has been controversial, being viewed by many observers as a recipe for corruption, inefficiency and poorly allocated capital but there is no sign of political will to shift from such planned capitalism.
It also reflects the extent to which the oil and gas industries have become even more diverse, with the industry venturing into areas that would have either been once viewed as economically unviable or unstable.
This is certainly notable in the level of development currently in Africa, with Nigeria cited as a key energy jurisdiction holding Africa’s largest known oil reserves after Libya.
Comments one energy partner at a major law firm: ‘A new thing in Nigeria is the move from international oil companies (IOCs) developing oil and gas fields to much more indigenous partners. A lot of them don’t have the expertise, so what often happens is international oil and gas companies, whether the independents or the majors, form partnerships with local companies.’
Russell Wells, energy and infrastructure finance partner at Clifford Chance (CC), says that there is increasing demand for national energy players to bring in western know-how and apply internationally-recognised standards. ‘We often help them put in place infrastructure around anti-corruption, compliance and procedures, money laundering – a whole raft of things. We have a toolkit for these things nowadays,’ he says.
One oil GC cites moves in Nigeria to lock out foreign firms as illustrative of the pressure his employer faces. ‘The Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) is a long-running piece of draft legislation, which essentially says to favour indigenous companies over international ones, making it difficult for international companies to operate on a level playing field.’
However, as a result of conflict over the terms among multinationals and politicians, along with deep-seated corruption, Nigeria’s PIB – which was first drafted in 2008 and provides, among other changes, for 10% of the after-tax profits of the onshore and shallow-water operations to flow to communities – is still yet to be passed.
Through several joint ventures with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), international companies, as of 2013, still produce the majority of the oil in Nigeria, where there is a high demand for assets in the Niger Delta, which holds a large portion of Nigeria’s 35 billion barrels of oil reserves.
Reports emerged at the end of last year that Shell is to sell up to $30bn of assets in 2014, including a $7bn stake in Woodside Petroleum, one of Australia’s largest oil and gas producers; oil assets in the Niger Delta worth $2bn; and other assets totalling $20bn, according to oil and gas analysts from J.P. Morgan Cazenove.
This came after then chief executive Peter Voser reported in October that third-quarter pre-tax profits had slumped by 32% to $4.2bn, with results taking a $300m hit due to the ‘deteriorating security situation’ in Nigeria and a blockade there.
By the same token Eni, Italy’s largest oil company, announced a 14% fall in profits to $1.77bn in the fourth quarter compared to the same time last year due to production halts in Libya and Nigeria.
In the emerging markets in which major companies choose to operate, they are forced to work with competing national interests. In an industry dominated by joint ventures, in-house legal teams at energy groups regularly confront some of the most challenging contractual and antitrust issues handled in global law.
‘Because of the costs involved and the access to resources required, particularly in upstream, it is very difficult to do anything without partnering with a national or international oil company, whether as a formal joint venture or a joint co-operational project,’ says antitrust counsel Edyth Kyegombe, who forms part of Shell’s dedicated antitrust team.
‘As soon as we start co-operating with someone, it presents unique challenges in terms of antitrust in making sure that you stay within the boundaries of what you think is acceptable and not sharing information beyond what is necessary. It’s actually an area where there isn’t that much practical guidance and so very often you take judgement calls on issues.
‘When you’re dealing with less sophisticated counter-parties in particular, who don’t have as much experience with dealing with these kinds of issues or anti-corruption or bribery laws, it’s a case of trying to convince them that these are actually live issues and need to be taken seriously,’ adds Kyegombe.
Thinking big and small
It is not just pressure from national governments that is incentivising large international companies to divest some of their interests in hard-to-manage jurisdictions. Increasingly, western companies are focusing their efforts in a smaller pool of large upstream projects – industry jargon for the higher margin exploration and extraction businesses – where they can gain the best returns.
‘Majors are pulling out of downstream to focus on upstream exploration and production (E&P),’ says Charles Morrison, head of the energy group at DLA Piper, which recently advised longstanding client Oando – Nigeria’s largest non-government-owned company in the energy industry, where chief legal officer Ngozi Okonkwo is considered a rising star – on all issues surrounding its $2bn acquisition of Chevron’s assets in Nigeria.
‘The majors can make more money out of each dollar of investment in E&P than in downstream, traders and new entrants can work with downstream much more effectively and efficiently, and it gives them a guaranteed short for the products they have available. It’s a very active area, we act for banks, traders and oil companies,’ adds Morrison.
‘The largest companies are pursuing projects that are an order of magnitude larger and more complex than just a decade ago. The number of lawyers supporting these projects is not necessarily increasing, but oil and gas lawyers are doing bigger things,’ says David Isenegger, GC of Centrica Energy, which has a team of 30 in-house lawyers in offices in Aberdeen, Calgary, Windsor and Stavanger.
Kyegombe comments: ‘As part of the economic downturn, we’ve been increasingly focusing on divesting our less profitable businesses and assets. Historically, it was important to have a presence everywhere, whereas now there has been the realisation that actually we don’t always have the local knowledge, expertise or presence to maintain a particularly profitable business everywhere. The refining sector has been struggling for a number of years, refinery assets are less profitable and have been targets for divestment.’
The counterpoint to this shift in focus to more major projects and the run of divestments is the rise of mid and smaller independents which has emerged to fill the space. These independents vary from relatively large firms like American oil and gas exploration company Anadarko or companies with a specialist focus like Cuadrilla Resources, to much smaller AIM-listed concerns.
‘There has been a proliferation of independents,’ says Jason Fox, UK senior partner and energy finance partner at US energy law firm Bracewell & Giuliani. ‘When I started 25 years ago, there were single figures in terms of the number of independents listed in London. Now there are dozens.’
‘It’s a big story at the moment,’ says Isenegger. ‘There are more players below major size investing heavily. They can be anything between start-ups ready to invest in a single project to major independents investing billions. As majors get involved in bigger projects, they are selling off assets that have become marginal for them. This allows start-ups and independents to come in and invest and apply new technology. My private practice friends tell me they are getting more instructions from the independents.’
Typical deals of this kind saw Shell this year agree a $2.6bn sale of its downstream Australian assets to Vitol – the world’s largest independent oil trader – and the sale of a number of its businesses in Italy to affiliates of Kuwait Petroleum International.
Last month saw German power giant RWE secure a €5.1bn sale of its upstream oil and gas business RWE Dea to Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and German Khan.
With this space in the market, relatively small businesses are now growing. ‘The independents, like Tullow Oil or Cairn, are growing into bigger propositions,’ says Robin Storey, GC at Equus Petroleum, which produces up to 8,000 barrels per day with 43 million in reserve. ‘They have grown into full mid-caps or are knocking on the door. There are an awful lot of companies in the AIM market waiting to get finance, but there has been more equity raised in the last few months than I’ve seen for quite some time,’ adds Storey, who has a team of three lawyers for the upstream business in Kazakhstan and a paralegal in London.
If oil is a risky business in general, for smaller companies unable to diversify their exposure, making strategic investments can be a huge gamble, says Storey, who held the role of GC and company secretary at Stratic Energy Corporation from 2007 until it was bought by EnQuest for $45.7m in 2010.
‘At Stratic, we drilled Cairngorm, an unsuccessful commitment well with our last available funds in the North Sea for $20m. It’s the case with so many of the small to mid-cap companies that you raise money and go exploring and if it doesn’t work you go back to the shareholders and they may well say no.’
Such pressures often led companies to seek mergers – indeed, the energy sector has consistently been one of the largest and most active global M&A markets in recent years.
‘For small companies, a routine operational delay can leave a $50m hole in cashflow and you have to go back and get $50m. But small companies trying to operate in one country can bring enormous returns – it’s possible to see a tenfold return in your investment, so it’s attractive to hold some of these shares. Often companies have to merge and if they’re lucky, everyone lives to fight another day,’ adds Storey.
Black gold, red tape
Even as oil companies have had to deal with an increasingly risky global market, they have had to cope with a global-wide push towards tighter regulation, focused primarily on two fronts: environmental protection and anti-corruption.
This means considerable pressure on GCs to manage liabilities and risks through far tougher defence measures – which largely revolve around being able to demonstrate robustly enforced procedures.
‘It’s not only the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries that have exponentially increased their regulation, but also 140 others around the world,’ asserts one GC at a major oil and gas company.
The UK Bribery Act of 2010 and the US’s longstanding Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) have both had a major impact on the energy sector, with the former controversially banning facilitation payments in foreign markets for UK-listed companies, a huge issue for the industry.
‘If you get to a border between Uganda and Zambia and there is a queue of 200 people and to get through you have to pay a small amount that doesn’t amount to much more than administration, the FCPA allows it but the Bribery Act doesn’t. Or if a local official expects $20 to process a form that you need to get a permit to run your business. It can make it hideous to do business,’ says Allen & Overy M&A partner, Jeremy Parr. ‘I’ve done deals in Africa that started with six countries and ended up with two because we couldn’t get over bribery issues in some countries.’
Corruption aside, recent years have ushered in a raft of market regulation, including the EU Regulation on Wholesale Energy Market Integrity and Transparency (REMIT) and the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), which stems from the EU’s Third Energy Package, which seeks to further open up the gas and electricity markets, entering into force in 2009.
While in the US, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law in 2010, was passed as a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system in response to the recession, but reaches far beyond financial institutions, affecting oil and gas companies in terms of use of conflict minerals, foreign government payments, derivatives transactions and how they are used.
With the oil and gas business based around dozens of major jurisdictions, finding a way through the maze of regulations to find a solution that works for all parties has become increasingly challenging and expensive.
The UK, meanwhile, looks set for another shake-up in its energy policy, with the publication of the government-commissioned Wood Report in February, which called for a new industry regulator and a blueprint for long-term investment to radically improve the exploitation of the UK’s oil and gas assets. The report, which has been welcomed by senior politicians, argues that its proposals would add £200bn to the UK economy over the next 20 years, a key issue given the legacy of falling North Sea oil production since the early 2000s.
‘One of the difficulties is that the EU regulations which are applicable in the UK are not always consistent with what goes on in the US so if you’re operating in both you have the challenge of making sure one does not conflict with the other,’ says Grant Dawson, who has been GC and company secretary of Centrica since its demerger from British Gas in February 1997.
Separate to the challenge of knitting together global regulatory frameworks, the pressure to manage risks of environmental disaster remains huge, in recent years obviously highlighted in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On one hand the underlying level of oil spills has been steadily falling over the last 30 years thanks to tighter industry standards in western jurisdictions. However, when they happen, spills can have a huge impact, with the Deepwater leak spilling the equivalent of an estimated 4.9 million barrels, around 19 times that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez leak, and landing BP with a multibillion-dollar clean-up bill.
‘What happens after [BP’s Deepwater] accident, in terms of the US issues, is there are telephone directories full of new regulations,’ says one veteran oil and gas GC. ‘Subsequently all the other governments do the same thing, even in a mature basin such as the North Sea, where you would not need the same precautions as you would in the Gulf of Mexico because the challenges have been known for 40 years and are much better managed.
‘So you have regulations that are appropriate for certain circumstances being applied in all circumstances, and that is a major handicap for the industry. A country will say that because you are taking a concession in our country and you have one in a neighbouring country, we want to challenge that and we want you to do a filing. For very little antitrust relevance you need to go through the loop again.’
Having to navigate this complex web of rules has given rise to dedicated in-house compliance teams at oil majors. At Centrica, their dedicated ten-strong financial compliance team reports to Dawson but is currently being reorganised to report to chief executive Sam Laidlaw or the audit committee. The team was built around anti-corruption regulations and did not exist in its current form three years ago.
Eni too grew its dedicated compliance team of 50 lawyers from just ten three years ago, with 15 now focusing on anti-corruption issues, which was set up from scratch following an anti-bribery case.
‘Compliance is growing, which is why we have structured a proper anti-bribery unit brought in from the outside. We hire lawyers with a criminal and forensic background,’ says Mantovani.
‘As is often the case with these things, they often come out of something pathological. We had quite a nasty case with the Department of Justice, known as TSKJ, which was one of the biggest in Nigeria and was peculiar because it involved four companies [including Eni], which were involved in this consortium involved in bribing.
‘As part of the settlement they normally ask you to put in a monitoring unit, which is usually to see how you’re managing anti-bribery and corruption and that was imposed on all partners of the TSKJ consortium. We were not imposed but we agreed ourselves to set up the unit. They do everything: internal regulation, training, forensic, and investigations into specific red flags,’ recalls Mantovani.
And it is not just the size of teams that has grown but also the prominence of compliance within the business.
‘Systems and processes need to look more closely at the business. Business people cannot be effective without legal and compliance, therefore the people who are closest to the business are compliance,’ says Isenegger. ‘The board is increasingly focusing on financial crime issues. The risk is increasing and regulators are more aggressive. Directors want shareholders protected and they have their own reputations to think about. Fraud or bribery problems can easily become full-scale crises.’
Such a specialist legal investment is worth the money argues Mantovani: ‘It is expensive to have a team like this and to do proper investigations on all red flags, which is an extra budget cost we had not considered a few years ago. However, it’s difficult to find another way to do it. You can’t rely on outside firms on a daily basis without having a particular file; compliance must be an internal affair.’
Given the risk profile facing the industry, it has also become common at energy teams to beef up their contentious capability. Shell built a dedicated litigation team for the first time under former legal head Peter Rees QC, which was designed primarily to manage the cost associated with cases. The energy sector has been a major factor in accounting for the sustained global boom in arbitration, with alternative dispute resolution often the only practical means to thrash-out disputes involving highly complex cross-border joint ventures.
Indeed, energy has generated some of the world’s largest arbitrations, including the $100bn claim by Yukos’ shareholders against the Russian Federation over the company’s effective forced takeover; the 2011 arbitration between BP and its Russian joint venture partner Alfa-Access-Renova; and the long-running dispute facing Chevron over alleged environmental damage in Ecuador.
In a noteworthy recent postscript to the Chevron dispute, on 4 March US district judge Lewis Kaplan refused to enforce a 2011 judgment in Ecuador, after concluding that bribes had been used in pursuit of an $18bn judgment against the oil company, in what has been regarded as a key win for Chevron’s US counsel Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
‘To an extent we can manage litigation in-house but then depending on the size of the case very often we need to involve external counsel. For discovery purposes we just don’t have the resources to do that in-house but certainly smaller ones can be handled in-house,’ says Kyegombe.
Eni set up its flexible arbitration team of around four lawyers about two years ago in response to the company’s need for on-call arbitrators that could grow or shrink depending on the number of cases at a given time.
‘We were managing three or four big arbitrations at the same time in different areas of the world for which we needed better expertise than we used to have,’ says Mantovani. ‘You can’t always rely on outside firms either because there is an issue of co-ordination, and they can be very complex in terms of internal assessment and what to do in terms of the strategy and documentation.
‘So we set up a flexible team, a mix of secondments and temporary contracts and they are only focused on price revision arbitration. We may lose those secondments or may end some of the temporary contracts depending on how things go.’
Hot air and hype
If the history of the energy industry has been defined by oil, the future for many sector lawyers is expected to be increasingly shaped by gas and a proliferating group of alternative energy sources.
The rapid expansion of gas extraction – increasingly involving what would once have been unconventional extraction techniques has substantially added to the world’s energy supply and helped to drive down gas and oil prices. The big story in this regard has been the US’s massive development of shale gas, pushing the country towards energy sufficiency. Gas has huge potential for further exploration with a host of countries, including China, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Australia and Canada, holding significant reserves.
This burgeoning industry comes with a whole set of legal issues specific to the buying, selling and production of gas, including pressure, temperature and calorific value, among others. But this will also mean more work for lawyers in creating infrastructure in emerging jurisdictions to support it.
The exploration of new oil reserves has continually shifted the debate on consumption of oil reserves, with ‘peak oil’ theories repeatedly proving wrong over the last four decades as new sources are found. The dash for gas has been further underwritten by pressure to deal with pollution – as it emits far less pollutants than oil.
‘Gas is becoming more important than oil, generally – whether it’s shale gas or offshore gas deposits like in Tanzania, Mozambique – so what you’re seeing are very, very large capital projects that run into billions,’ says Wells.
‘Suddenly when people are talking about doing those kinds of deals in Tanzania or Mozambique where no one’s ever seen anything on that sort of scale, you’re basically building the legal and regulatory framework from the ground up. The challenges of helping develop those markets, also brings for us a genuine human/social interest, you can see how these projects and developments have the capacity to change a country’s fortunes almost overnight.’
By the same token, renewable energy and nuclear – though they have fallen from grace over the last five years in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima leak in 2011 and the withdrawal of subsidies for some renewable energy projects are expected to come ultimately to the fore. In pure technological terms – solar is viewed as having the greatest potential given the dramatic increases in efficiency and cost. On some estimates, renewable energy now generates more power globally than nuclear, while the cost of solar power has halved in the last five years.
Globally, social tension and political upheaval continues to buffet the industry, from the current stand-off in Ukraine – which has huge potential to disrupt European gas supplies – to regional instability in North Africa to the debate over this year’s referendum on Scottish independence, which largely turns on ownership of North Sea reserves. Whatever happens, as one oil and gas GC sums up, ‘change is the only thing you can count on’. LB
francesca.fanshawe@legalease.co.uk
Powered up – oil and gas legal teams
The oil and gas industry has long forged some of the most highly-rated legal teams seen in the bluechip world, boasting wide-ranging specialist knowledge that often exceeds private practice and attracting
a superb general quality of practitioner. The scale of the industry likewise means that in-house teams at the largest companies can easily rival the scale and global reach of all but the largest international law firms.
Oil majors typically build teams with lawyers with a long track record in the industry and a huge depth of knowledge in ‘pure’ energy law, meaning the regulatory and contractual law that underpins agreements in exploration, production, sale and transmission of oil and gas. In addition, teams typically have substantial capabilities in antitrust, project finance and capital markets and corporate. Recent years have also seen the emergence of far larger in-house contentious teams and dedicated compliance and anti-bribery teams.
In the sector, the recent move that has made ripples is the surprise exit of legal director at Royal Dutch Shell, Peter Rees QC, whose departure from the 1,000-staff global legal team was announced in February. The veteran litigator had heavily shaken-up the operation of Shell’s team, including forging a standalone disputes team, in an approach that had ruffled some feathers internally.
His replacement is former general counsel (GC) for Shell’s project and technology business, Donny Ching – who has been with the $450bn turnover company since 1988 in a variety of roles around the world. Ching unsurprisingly comes with a strong reputation, with one partner commenting: ‘He has been around the industry for a long time but is very sensible with it. A lovely guy.’
Another senior change saw Total appoint oilfield services veteran Maarten Scholten to the role of GC in January as longstanding incumbent Peter Herbel retired after nine years as senior vice president and GC. Having spent 20 years in various legal roles in the industry, Scholten joined from Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services company, where he was director of M&A.
On the Total team, legal manager for international M&A, Lee Young, is highly-regarded and has ‘a great name in the market’, according to one energy finance partner, having joined the €200bn oil and gas group from petrol forecourt company Rontec in October last year.
BP’s group GC Rupert Bondy has long enjoyed a strong reputation but his standing has been enhanced by the handling of the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which culminated in a multibillion-dollar clear-up operation. In a sector in which many lawyers are confirmed sector specialists, Bondy came from a life sciences background, having joined SmithKline Beecham as senior counsel for M&A in 1995. He joined BP in 2008.
BP’s US GC John Lynch is similarly cited for work on Deepwater. Of BP’s younger lawyers, global treasury senior counsel, James Renwick, received multiple recommendations in this year’s GC Power List: Rising Stars having been heavily involved in BP’s $17.1bn sale of its 50% stake in TNK-BP to Russia’s Rosneft in return for cash and shares in 2012.
Senior legal counsel at Eni, Nicholas Trevelyan, was also praised in Rising Stars, having been heavily involved in Eni’s Kashagan oil project in the North Caspian Sea, which has seen one of the largest oil fields discovered in the last 40 years give rise to one of the most complex industrial projects worldwide.
Other oil and gas lawyers highlighted in this year’s Power List report include Vicky Corley of Ithaca Energy, Lilia Alexander of GE Oil & Gas Subsea Systems and Edyth Kyegombe of Shell International.
Of the mid-size independents with leaner teams, Petrofac’s group head of legal Roger Harwood is praised as having ‘good pedigree and runs a legal team well’. Also rated is Tullow Oil’s legal team, with GC and company secretary Graham Martin having a strong reputation in the industry.
The legal team headed by GC Hans Henrik Klouman at Norwegian state-owned Statoil receives plaudits from private practice for supporting Norway’s economic success. Comments one partner: ‘The business and social function is inculcated into the culture of the team.’
Of the indigenous companies, recently appointed GC at Slovakia’s BTG Holdings, Richard Asher, is praised as ‘one that the market recognises as having real expertise’, while chief legal officer of Nigeria’s Oando – one of Africa’s largest integrated energy providers – Ngozi Okonkwo is described as being ‘hugely admired by banks and by companies on both sides of the table’.