Roula Khaled is the General Counsel and Head of Ethics and Compliance of Khazna Data Centres. 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 24 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.

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. 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.

Roula has a Degree in Law from the Saint Joseph University in Beirut, an MA in Internal and International Business Law from the French affiliate of the Lebanese University (Filière Francophone de Droit), and a certificate in the Essentials of Business from the American University of Beirut. Alongside her executive role, Roula is a faculty member at the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances and she regularly speaks on legal innovation, AI and governance, infrastructure, risk mitigation and corporate strategy at industry panels and legal forums.