Professor Thomas Wälde was a leading legal scholar and practitioner in the field of international energy and natural resources. Though based in a small village outside St Andrews for the last 15 years, his influence was global. As he explained in a recording made a year ago, his aim in life was to understand “what lay underneath the emperor’s clothes” and to reveal and explain truths, however unpalatable they might be.

Wälde’s most important work came framing contractual agreements between governments that controlled mineral deposits, including oil and gas wells, and multinational companies that explored and exploited reserves. Governments invariably want to draw maximum revenue but are often unwilling, or unable, to undertake the physical mining or drilling work.

Exploration and production companies, meanwhile, want assurance that their costs will be covered and that they will earn enough profit to make involvement worthwhile.

Problems often arise because of doubts that surround almost all mining and drilling projects. It is usually impossible to be sure of the size of deposits and the prices that metals or hydrocarbons will fetch on the world markets once they are out of the ground. It is equally difficult to estimate, ahead of time, how easy or difficult it will be to exploit reserves. In addition, companies often want compensation for the political risk that governments may change, or change their minds, midway through a project than could last many years.

Among the countries Wälde worked with were Burkina Faso and Mozambique in Africa; Thailand and Uzbekistan in Asia; Colombia and Venezuela in South America and Estonia and Serbia in Europe. He also had dealings in Saudia Arabia, Iran, India, China, Russia, Brazil and the US.

Wälde’s vibrant personality helped him in his work bringing opponents together. But he cared little for political correctness and did not shirk from addressing unpleasant truths about the mining world’s vested interests, empty rhetoric, shady deals and corrupt practices. At the same time, however, he supported coherent and just policy making, and assisted those who wished to deepen their understanding of problems.

Wälde developed his understanding of legal frameworks relating to energy and natural resources as an adviser to governments and companies, as a mediator and arbitrator, as an academic researcher into the critical issues of the day, as an educator, and through his leadership of the Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy at the University of Dundee.

He was a fluent speaker and writer of English, German, French and Spanish and had a working knowledge of Italian, Russian and Arabic. He worked on the legal positioning of environmental legislation, investment, taxation, decommissioning of offshore operations, and the privatisation of state-owned companies. His appreciation of economic realities was unusual among legal experts of his type. It made his advice all the more sought after.

Thomas Walter Wälde was born in January 1949 and grew up in Heidelberg in a family that was proud of its links with Germany's southwest region. His great uncle, Reinhold Maier, was the first prime minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Another uncle, Heinz Maïer-Leibnitz, was a professor of nuclear physics and President of the German National Science Foundation. Wälde attended school at the Kurfürst Friedrich Gymnasium and went on to study law at the universities of Heidelberg, Lausanne-Geneva, Berlin and Frankfurt.

In 1980 he joined the United Nations and later became a UN inter-regional adviser on international investment policy and petroleum and mineral legislation. He advised more than 60 governments on legislative reform and contract negotiations. From 1981 to 1983, Wälde was a UN investigator on occupation practices in Palestinian territories and was responsible for the Secretary-General’s reports on “permanent sovereignty over natural resources” and on the permanent sovereignty in occupied Palestinian territories. He initiated the UN project for environmental guidelines in mining and was chair of the drafting group that produced the first version of the “Berlin guidelines” in 1990.

In 1991 he joined the University of Dundee as director of the Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy. He was later awarded a Jean-Monnet Chair in European Economic and Energy Law by the European Commission. As an academic, Wälde established the examination of so-called production sharing contracts as a separate discipline within academic study of the law. Under his leadership the centre underwent a period of rapid growth. He developed the university’s reputation in these fields in his own image. It is international and interdisciplinary at the same time as combining academic excellence and professional relevance. Many of its alumni hold leading positions in governments and major institutions influencing policy and practice at the highest level throughout the world.

While at the university, Wälde used and extended his global networks to develop a virtual campus of leading practitioners and scholars around the world who became part of the Dundee intellectual family in many cases without ever having set foot in Scotland. For those who knew him personally, he was an inspirational mentor and leader who always had time to guide and advise.

After stepping down from the post of director in 2001, he maintained his role as a teacher and expanded his activities in the field of dispute resolution and arbitration, where he quickly enhanced his already formidable reputation.

Thomas Wälde died after an accident at his family’s holiday home in the South of France. He is survived by his second wife, Charlotte, and two children, one from a previous marriage.

Professor Thomas Wälde, lawyer, was born on January 9, 1949. He died in an accident on October 11, 2008, aged 59