Kultgen Appointed General Counsel

DHAHRAN, January 20, 2010 - David B. Kultgen was appointed as Saudi Aramco’s General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors held in Dhahran on Dec. 9. The appointment was effective Jan. 1, 2010.

Kultgen graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1970, and obtained his juris doctor degree in 1973 from the School of Law of the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the State Bar of Texas.

In 1973, Kultgen joined Aramco in New York, moving to the company’s headquarters in Dhahran in 1974. In 1982, he was assigned to the Law Department of Saudi Aramco’s principal U.S. subsidiary, Aramco Services Co. (ASC), where he remained until returning to Dhahran in 1989.

Over the course of his career with Saudi Aramco and its affiliates, he has concentrated on transactional and trade law. He participated as a member of the in-house negotiating teams responsible for affecting several of the company’s downstream joint-venture investments, both in Saudi Arabia and internationally, and was part of a Saudi Aramco team that supported the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources in the negotiation of energy-related issues during the Kingdom’s successful accession to the World Trade Organization.

He is only the second general counsel in Saudi Aramco’s history, succeeding Stan McGinley, and only the fifth general counsel in the 76-year combined history of the Arabian American Oil Co. (Aramco) and Saudi Aramco. He and his wife, Candy, have three children, two of whom practice law in New York City. The third is a management trainee with a major transportation-services company in the Washington D.C. area.