Asst. Prof. Dr. Cem Veziroğlu (Koç University, Istanbul) & Res. Asst. Abdurrahman Kayıklık (Koç University, Istanbul)

The Climate Crisis and Private Companies: How to Address the Sustainability Arbitrage Problem?

About the Speakers:
Cem Veziroğlu, Assistant Professor of Commercial Law at Koç University Law School, holds an LL.B. from Galatasaray University and a Magister Juris from the University of Oxford. He is an affiliate scholar with the UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality and Sustainable Development and serves as editor-in-chief of the NASAMER Law Blog. He is active as arbitrator, counsel, and expert witness in domestic and international commercial arbitrations.

Having co-authored a book on leveraged buyouts and financial assistance prohibition following his master’s studies, Veziroğlu completed his doctorate at the University of Istanbul. His doctoral research, carried out at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg with scholarship funding from the Max Planck Society, culminated in the publication of his dissertation “Contractual Freedom and Its Limits in Corporate Law” in 2021. He actively contributes to global projects funded by the EU, the World Bank, and the British Council. Spanning corporate and arbitration law as well as sustainability, his research focuses have translated into teaching a course on climate change and private law at King’s College London.

Abdurrahman Kayıklık is a doctoral candidate and a teaching and research assistant at Koç University Law School. He is currently a visiting doctoral researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He received his LL.B and a B.A. in economics from Koç University and holds an LL.M from Harvard Law School (2019). His research interests include company law, sustainability, and corporate arbitration. He has published several articles and book chapters on these topics. He is also an associate editor at NASAMER Law Blog.

About the Topic:
The pressing challenges of climate change have led to a wide range of policy proposals concerning the green transitioning of companies. Although private companies, especially in the energy sector, have played a significant role in causing the climate crisis, most current strategies focus on public companies. Such a single-minded approach to policy-making could give rise to sustainability arbitrage, a phenomenon whereby the activities that cause climate change gradually shift from public firms to private ones. This may, in turn, create a world in which public firms are green while their private rivals become the main driver of the activities contributing to the climate crisis. The speakers will discuss the problem of sustainability arbitrage, its manifestations, and possible regulatory and investor-led strategies to overcome it.

About the Seminar Series:
The seminar series “Current Research on Turkish Law” regularly invites outstanding scholars and practitioners working on different topics of Turkish private law to present and discuss their findings. The seminar series particularly aims to create a platform where both international researchers interested in Turkish law and Turkish researchers working on comparative law can come together and exchange scholarly ideas.