Mehmet Mücahit Arvas

Arvas graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Law in 2005. After completing his one-year legal internship in 2007, he worked for three years as in-house counsel at Turkish Petroleum Corporation, working with international companies on projects in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

In 2010 he was appointed Assistant Trade Specialist at the Ministry of Trade, Directorate General of Domestic Trade, becoming a Trade Specialist with a thesis titled “The Status of Commodity Exchanges in the Face of the Concept of Professional Organisations with Public Institution Status.” He was the only specialist lawyer working on commodity exchanges and chambers of commerce in the public sector.

In 2014 he completed a master's degree in International Trade Law at Bournemouth University in England on a Ministry scholarship, with a thesis titled “How the UK Courts Apply and Interpret Islamic Law to Substance.”

On his return to Türkiye he served as Project Manager of the Secured Transactions Reform Project. Within the scope of SME access to finance, he worked on the drafting of Law No. 6750 on Pledge over Movable Assets in Commercial Transactions and managed the establishment and operation of the Movable Pledge Registry (TARES) together with the Turkish Union of Notaries.

In 2017 he was appointed Head of the Electronic Commerce Department. At the same time he served as Türkiye's focal point for the “Getting Credit” chapter of the World Bank's Doing Business project. As a result of that work, Türkiye rose from 77th to 32nd among 190 countries on access to credit, and thousands of SMEs gained access to finance.

To build data-driven electronic commerce policy, he managed the Electronic Trade Trust Seal, the Electronic Trade Information System (ETBİS) and the Electronic Trade Information Platform projects. During the pandemic he ran the solidarity campaign “As e-commerce, we stand by SMEs.” Measures introduced to ensure commercial electronic messages served their intended purpose and to prevent unwanted SMS reduced complaints in the Commercial Message Complaint System by ninety per cent.

In 2017 he began a doctorate in Private Law at Ankara University Institute of Social Sciences. He is writing the first doctoral thesis on the UNCITRAL Model Law on Secured Transactions, focusing in particular on the collateralisation of digital assets.

In 2020 he was appointed Commercial Counsellor in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where his work maintained the stability of trade between Türkiye and Saudi Arabia despite embargo allegations from some quarters. He then spent some three years as a senior foreign trade specialist at the Directorate General of International Trade in Services, contributing to state aid legislation for the services sector.

He founded marvas legal in 2023. He continues to teach part-time at TED University and to pursue academic work through books, book chapters and articles.