The lawyer, of Ugandan and Australian nationality, has been appointed Standard Chartered Bank’s Global General Counsel for Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking. She has also been appointed Standard Chartered Bank’s General Counsel for Europe and the Americas. She will be based in Singapore.
Prior to her appointment, Samallie Kiyingi was, since April 2017, General Counsel of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), a pan-African multilateral financial institution dedicated to the financing and promotion of intra- and extra-African trade. As General Counsel of this Cairo, Egypt-based bank, Samallie Kiyingi oversaw the structuring, negotiation and documentation of the bank’s transactions and projects in various sectors, including trade finance, project finance, corporate finance, capital markets and international law. She also advised the bank’s President and Board of Directors on strategy, risk, policy and complex legal issues.
Leader
An expert in capital markets and finance issues in Africa, Samallie Kiyingi worked in leading companies and international law firms before joining Afreximbank. “I moved from a private practice to a department head position at an international financial institution. That’s where I learned what it meant to be a leader rather than just a good lawyer,” she said in an interview.
Prior to Afreximbank, Samallie Kiyingi worked in London for 3 years as a senior consultant at ADI Advisors | African Finance and Capital Markets Consultancy, where she advised companies and regulators on the development of capital markets in Africa.
Long before that, Samallie Kiyingi was global head of Deutsche Bank’s securitization advisory and regulatory policy group in London. Prior to that, for 6 years, she was Senior Associate, Structured Products and Capital Markets Group at Clifford Chance, also in London.
Samallie Kiyingi began her career in Sydney, Australia, where she was a partner at Ashurst Law Firm (formerly Blake Dawson Waldron) for two years.
Legal Director of the Year
Admitted to practice as a solicitor in England & Wales and Australia, Samallie Kiyingi holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of International Studies from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and a Master of Finance and Financial Law from the University of London. She has also trained at Harvard University, USA, and at the International Institute for Management Development, Lausanne.
On September 2, 2022, Samallie Kiyingi received the “General Counsel of the Year” award in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the ninth edition of the “African Legal Awards”, which celebrate the outstanding achievements of Africa’s legal elite.
Art collector
Samallie Kiyingi is also an art collector. To this end, she is the founder of “ArtNaka”, a private membership platform focused on art from Africa and its diasporas, which was born out of her desire to highlight exceptional creative talent, develop a more sustainable art market for contemporary African art and contribute to a more representative global art conversation.
Over the past decade, she has supported artists, advised on art projects and art collecting. Samallie Kiyingi is a founding member of the African Art Acquisition Committee at Tate Modern, the Museum of Contemporary Art in London. She also sits on the boards of several arts organizations, including Gasworks | Triangle Arts Trust (London), Ugandan Arts Trust | 32 Degrees East (Kampala) and the Kuenyehia Art Prize (Accra).
