What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

As publicly known, ENGIE has developed successful NG projects through its affiliates. In this sense, without a doubt, the expansion of the Mayakan pipeline is the project that encompasses the most efforts from all supporting areas, including legal. This project has been a unique opportunity for teamwork and a challenge for the legal team, which has demonstrated the importance of each of its members and how valuable interconnection among all areas is to move forward and obtain results.

There is a well-known phrase in my country that reads, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go accompanied’, which reflects exactly how this transaction was constructed. I might rephrase it to, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far and obtain results, go with a team’.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?  

In recent years, we have been applying a programme to standardise contracts. The objective was to reduce holding times for our corporate users and avoid minimum tailor-made agreements.

This project has been very successful and economically feasible. At the beginning, we started with low-risk and not very sophisticated agreements, such as NDAs. However, thanks to the great results obtained and the acceptance of our internal stakeholders, we are now using standard versions of many more types of agreements, in which, in some cases, the requesting user can fill out the standard agreement without the need for an extra legal review, which, as you can imagine, is totally business-oriented.

What is a cause, business related or otherwise, that you care about, and why? 

I have been asked several times why I love working in the energy sector. The response to that question, and the reason I care the most about and that keeps me in this professional field, is the social impact that energy projects produce on people. For instance, when a NG pipeline arrives in a place where there is no access to this type of fuel, investments and industries immediately start to arrive in such places.

Many people may not know this, but a lot of industrial processes require NG to function. Thus, when a pipeline arrives, industry accompanies its arrival, which represents jobs for people and a way for families to improve their quality of life. That is why I love my job, as it gives me the opportunity to be part of something that will transform communities, their economies, and, most importantly, families and individuals.

I am very excited about the new technologies to come, such as biogas, which is a technology that can utilise existing pipelines and infrastructure with minimal adjustments to distribute these fuels. In addition to the previously mentioned economic and social benefits, they have an environmental advantage due to their renewable nature and their contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.