Roula Khaled is the General Counsel and Head of Ethics and Compliance of Khazna Data Centres, a joint venture between G42, MGX and Silver Lake. She built the Legal Department and the Ethics and Compliance function of Khazna Data Center from scratch (The team is currently composed of 10 lawyers specialized in Corporate, Governance, Compliance, Commercial, Construction, Employment, Mergers and Acquisitions, etc). She oversees legal strategy, corporate governance, compliance frameworks and high-value commercial transactions. She is also a board-facing executive and company secretary, responsible for stakeholder management and board reporting. Roula has over 20 years of experience leading and advising on cross-border and domestic M&A transactions (including acquisitions of data centres and telecom operators), joint ventures, finance deals, restructuring matters and on a wide variety of corporate, commercial and strategic transactions in several jurisdictions including the Gulf Cooperation Council, Asia, Europe and Africa.
Before moving in-house, Roula started her career as a private practice lawyer in Paris, Lebanon and the UAE. Her most recent roles were as a Regional Senior Legal Counsel at IBM, where she worked on technology and consulting deals (including GBS) in the UAE and KSA and as a Regional Senior Counsel at Majid Al Futtaim Ventures, where she handled the corporate, commercial, employment, IP and litigation matters, covering UAE, KSA, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Lebanon and Egypt. Before that, she spent six years as a Legal Counsel Mergers and Acquisitions at Etisalat working on some of the biggest deals in the region, including the acquisition of Maroc Telecom, the sale of Zantel and Canar, and the merger of Etisalat Lanka with Hutch Lanka.