About

With ‘remarkable industry knowledge’, Rodolfo Mario García Paredes has been at Colombia’s state hydrocarbons enterprise, ECOPETROL, for 14 years. His tenure stretches back to before the company’s crucial 2003 restructuring (designed to allow it to compete in the global hydrocarbons industry), and the subsequent 2006 decree that allowed private investment in the company, thereby facilitating such competition. Currently head of corporate legal matters, García notes that these processes, which ‘from one day to the next put the company in direct competition with the private sector’, involved, from a legal perspective, ‘a profound change of culture, the learning of new juridical material and new forms of doing business, which one had to pick up in accelerated and rigorous fashion’. With the company’s subsequent international expansion into Brazil, Peru and the US, the legal department found itself involved in joint ventures, farm out agreements and joint study and bidding agreements, matters it would have not have handled even shortly before; today his dozen-strong team are ‘recognised experts’ in such work. A more recent transactional challenge was the $1.75bn acquisition (in conjunction with Talisman), of BP Exploration Company Colombia, in early 2011. This involved a legal team of 25 on due diligence matters alone, as well as parallel negotiations with both the vendor and the co-acquirer. One international counsel who worked on the deal, Norton Rose Fulbright’s Chrysten Perry comments ‘he’s very careful, very thoughtful. Throughout all the pressures he is very reasoned and calm’. Moreover, ‘he’s a good listener, careful in his thinking and someone who works through problems collaboratively. Frankly, he’s a pleasure to work with’. García says of Ecopetrol: ‘with 120 lawyers it’s not unlike a law firm, and as the biggest company in the country, and with our expansion overseas, the work one undertakes is very interesting from a juridical point of view. Personally, I also have the sense that I am working for the good of the country’.