Architects Of Trust: Hadef & Partners

From government advisory to the financing of major assets, Emirati firm Hadef & Partners brings a local perspective to the agreements behind the UAE’s national projects.

A US$3.8 billion subsea electricity transmission line. Three international sponsors. One Emirati law firm that, by its own account, advised them as UAE counsel from the bidding stage through financial close. That is Project Lightning, the development associated with ADNOC and TAQA, and it is a neat summary of what Hadef & Partners does.

The sponsors in question were Korea Electric Power Corporation, EDF and Kyushu Electric Power. ADNOC confirmed financial close in September 2022. The project was designed to connect offshore production operations with the onshore power network and reduce the carbon intensity of those operations. Here, a domestic infrastructure priority drew on overseas capital and technical expertise, and the legal work had to hold together a shared undertaking whose participants had different responsibilities and commercial interests. (A power cable beneath the sea, in other words, has a legal architecture above it.)

The practice brings more than four decades of local experience to such assignments. Hadef & Partners was established in 1980 by Dr. Hadef Al Dhaheri, and grew alongside the UAE’s institutions and private sector. Its founder later served as the country’s Minister of Justice from 2008 to 2014, returning to the practice as Founding Partner in August 2014. Today, its Abu Dhabi and Dubai offices serve businesses, investors and government entities.

That transactional experience sits alongside a government advisory practice covering legislative drafting, procurement and public law. Hadef says it has participated in preparing more than 200 federal and emirate-level laws and regulations. The practical payoff is that businesses need to understand the institutions administering a framework, not just the framework’s wording.

The firm also keeps a domestic advocacy capability, with advocates able to appear before UAE courts and tribunals. For anyone entering a long-term arrangement, advice on the original structure and representation if a disagreement follows are connected concerns. An obligation needs to be intelligible when it is negotiated and defensible when the parties read it differently.

International investors judge a deal partly on how well it works within the country where the asset will operate. With Project Lightning, Hadef helped translate a national infrastructure objective into commitments that financiers and project participants could act on, and that is the track record it carries into the next national project.