Energy and natural resources

A national oil company

Instructed through international counsel, the firm advised on the Petroleum Law 2020, on model production-sharing agreements and on licensing rounds. The recurring and most difficult work was the federalism question: which authority, the Federal Government or a Federal Member State, controls a given offshore right, and how a licensing round is run when both claim a say. The firm treated the constitutional question as the commercial question, on the basis that a production-sharing agreement is only as secure as the authority that granted it.

A sovereign government

The firm acted as co-counsel to a sovereign government in an international commercial arbitration seated in Europe, with roughly 157 million euros in dispute under a public infrastructure contract. Its contribution centred on Somali constitutional and administrative law: whether the contractual commitments in question were validly entered into given the approvals that state institutions are required to give, and what the consequences are when that process is not followed. The work combined close analysis of the domestic legal framework with the practical demands of an international arbitral proceeding.

A global technology company

Instructed on the licensing and regulatory framework for landing major international connectivity infrastructure, the firm advised on submarine cable landing licences, the treatment of carrier-neutral data centres, infrastructure-sharing arrangements and the law-enforcement assistance obligations that attach to the cable. Because the landing engaged both the Federal Government and a second Somali jurisdiction, each question had to be resolved twice and reconciled. The advice was structured so that it would hold as the subsidiary regulation under the National Communications Act 2017 continues to develop.