Expertise
Nora has more than 15 years’ experience as a corporate lawyer. She has advised on several corporate transactions, working with clients operating in the education, healthcare, infrastructure, real estate, and retail and consumer sectors. She advises family businesses on restructurings, corporate governance and compliance, shareholder arrangements, succession planning, asset ownership structuring, Shari’a-compliance, dispute resolution, and sustainability of family businesses. In addition, Nora advises clients on their complex domestic and cross-border corporate restructurings.
Selected corporate and restructuring experience
- Advising Aramex on their pre-sale restructuring (USD 91m) of their InfoFort business in various Middle East and Africa jurisdictions and the implementation of the new structure, which includes completion of assets/ shares transfers with the relevant authorities in each of the in-scope jurisdictions.
- Advising one of the UAE exchange houses on their corporate structure for compliance with the UAE Central Bank laws and regulations.
- Advising a multinational construction company on their restructuring of their corporate structure in several jurisdictions across the MENA region.
- Advising a French conglomerate specialising in luxury goods on the restructuring of their subsidiaries in the UAE and Saudi Arabia which includes designing the distribution, e-commerce, and flow of goods from a legal and regulatory perspective.
- Advising a Middle East retail company that owns and operates more than 50 leading international franchise concepts across the Middle East and North Africa.
Selected family business experience
- Advising a UAE public body on the recently introduced federal Family Business Law, suggesting enhancements to legislation specific to UAE family businesses to provide them with the tools to improve business sustainability and family unity.
- Advising the National Centre for Family Businesses in Saudi Arabia on recommendations to improve the legal framework for family businesses in the Kingdom. The review involved providing recommendations on amendments to the new commercial companies’ laws in Saudi Arabia in relation to family-owned companies.
- Advised on the establishment and governance of international family office (IFO) for a public listed company in Saudi Arabia with USD 5.9bn in total assets under management. The scope of work included advising on: (i) international and regional best practices that can be used in the context of an IFO; and (ii) the efficiency of the decision-making authority matrix related to the legal ownership and divestment of international assets.
- Advising one of the biggest UAE families on their dispute to assess and evaluate the assets related to the estate as well as conducting other activities to assist with the distribution of the estate to the heirs according to UAE and Islamic inheritance laws.