loucile@caveat

A multinational subsidiary or regional hub based in South Africa doesn’t only carry local compliance risk. It carries cross-border risk too  –  trade, technology, media, mobility  –  and these areas tend to get less attention than governance and employment, right up until one of them becomes a live issue. A few places where that risk

The legal work on an energy project doesn’t stop once the PPA is signed and financial close is reached. A second layer of obligation runs alongside the deal  –  tax, environmental, procurement  –  and it tends to get less attention simply because it isn’t the headline document. A few places where that second layer catches

Legal and HR leads running a South African subsidiary or regional hub tend to assume global policy has already covered most of the risk. It usually hasn’t — not because the global framework is wrong, but because it wasn’t built for this jurisdiction. Here’s where that gap tends to actually sit. Local governance obligations don’t

Multinational subsidiaries often have no shortage of lawyers. There is the employment firm. The competition specialist. A privacy adviser. A commercial contracts firm. A regulatory specialist. Group has its preferred international firms. Procurement has another panel. And somewhere in between sits the local Head of Legal trying to make sure the advice actually joins up.

Every energy project moves through the same sequence of legal pressure points — regardless of technology, size, or who’s at the table. Knowing what each one actually requires, before you’re inside it, is what keeps a project moving instead of stalling at each handoff. Here are the moments that matter most, and what tends to