About

Ana Carolina de Salles Freire spent over 15 years at leading law firm TozziniFreire, latterly as a partner, before moving in house at AES Brasil, initially as legal director, and since May 2013, also as director of compliance matters. Since her arrival, she has sought to integrate the work between the corporate and contract teams, particularly as regards debt issuance and transactional matters. This is of no small consequence given that, in the last 18 months alone, she has undertaken the legal coordination of the issuance of more than $1bn in debentures for the group’s Brazilian companies, AES Eletropaulo, AES Tietê and AES Sul. On the compliance side, while the company was already subject to the FCPA due to its US parent, her implementation of a corporate governance portal across the group’s Brazilian companies in 2012 has proved timely given that Brazilian anti-corruption legislation came in to effect in January 2014. Much to her own amusement, what started out as her biggest challenge, adapting to the corporate context after so long in private practice, has today become one of the aspects of her role that she most enjoys: ‘being close to my clients and to the business gives me the chance to learn much more and to embrace the challenges and projects with a passion and intensity that a lawyer cannot do when working for a law firm. It is a totally different approach and I really enjoy it’. Given her experience of private practice, it carries weight when she speaks of external counsel, whom she thinks ‘should pull on our shoes and better understand our business when providing assistance to us, pay attention to the deadlines and deliverables, and drop the “legalese”, adopting a more direct approach when interacting with us and providing legal advice to our business people’.