About

As group general counsel of Malaysian universal bank CIMB, Lee Chin Tok covers legal affairs relating to the business and support divisions, as well as at group level, across 17 jurisdictions. He joined the bank’s capital markets department in 1996 and was later appointed as the co-head of debt capital markets in the corporate banking, treasury and market divisions before rising to general counsel in 2014. He has a direct reporting line to CIMB’s group CEO and works closely with him and other senior management members. Among other things, Chin Tok is a member of the group management committee, the group Islamic banking committee, the group customer experience council, the group operational risk committee, the group crisis management committee, the committee on procurement and the disciplinary committee. Chin Tok has used this exposure to senior decision makers to place greater emphasis on training the group’s lawyers to better understand the business while simultaneously training business colleagues to better understand the potential legal issues arising from their activities. He is known as a highly skilled manager capable of moulding a geographically diverse legal team into a coherent unit, something which is particularly useful at CIMB, which currently employs around 90 lawyers globally, with in-country legal teams based in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam and a small staff based in Hong Kong, Shanghai and London.