Mariano Mazur leads the legal team of Perez Companc Family Group, a high profile Argentine business that has a variety of operations in its home territory as well as in a number of countries across Latin America, Spain and the US. The structure of internal legal support at the Group is devolved according to the different group companies, and as a result there are five separate teams for operative companies Molinos Río de la Plata, Molinos Agro, Pecom Servicios Energía, CONUAR and Goyaike. Supervising these teams, there is an additional team based in Perez Companc’s holding company and family office, which leads and oversees all legal teams and provides general legal advice across all areas and companies as well as to family shareholders.

Mazur explains an initiative that develop a ‘working agenda between the holding and each operative company’ so as to have a ‘clear understanding’ of the matters that are relevant and strategic to shareholders, and are to be addressed not only by the internal legal team of that company but also by the wider holding legal team. He claims that this method is crucial in terms of ‘getting the best of all us’ and forges close relationships amongst team members that means they can ‘share different opinions, views and experiences’ with each other, always aiming to achieve the business and the shareholders goals.

With a total team consisting of 19 lawyers and one non-lawyer in this structure, Mazur explains the culture of the function as having three distinct principles: ‘We have teams and persons with values that do things that generate value, a differential resource of our organisation is its people above economic or technological resources, and we foster personal motivation and development of all members so that each of them may realise their highest potential’. With these principles in mind, the company’s lawyers have dealt with significant cases in the last two years, mostly notably ‘a complex spin-off of Molinos Río de la Plata’s soybean crushing and exportation business and the setup of a new listed company – Molinos Agro’ which showed the team’s ability to grasp technical intricate legal concepts and utilise knowledge to achieve the goals of the business.

Able to support the companies in a variety of new projects, Mazur explains the legal team’s central role to the Group’s re-entry into the energy sector, where it helped on ‘the acquisition and consolidation of Pecom Servicios Energía (formerly known as Skanska), the development of Combustibles Nucleares Argentinos S.A. (CONUAR) and the continuing analysis of business opportunities in the energy sector’.