About

General counsel of the StarHub Group since 2004 and chief corporate officer of the company since October 2018, with an expansion of her portfolio beyond a legal role to include regulatory, corporate communications, investor relations and sustainability, Veronica Lai regards her work on the StarHub IPO as among her main career highlights. ‘It was highly complex and involved five shareholders in a vendor sale’, she says. ‘The IPO was a commercial success and the largest in the year it was launched’. In addition, she worked on the setting up and launch of StarHub’s US$2bn multi-currency medium term note (‘a milestone transaction for the group’, she says) and the Ensign InfoSecurity Singapore joint venture with Temasek Holdings which formed one of the largest flagship pure-play cyber security company in Asia in 2018, to name just a few other notable transactions Lai has had a major role in. Technological innovation has been key to the development of Lai’s legal function, as she explains: ‘From going paperless to adopting the use of portals to securely share and deposit information, we are open to using technology to improve efficiency and reduce margin of human error. Technology has also changed the way our business is conducted across all business lines’. Her and her team’s efforts to safeguard the company’s intellectual property have been extremely effective. ‘We have seen successful litigation in the anti-piracy space in the last two years, with the Courts validating dynamic hopping of pirate sites under the legislation. This is a significant win for the media industry. We continue to push the boundaries in an on-going criminal prosecution against sellers of illicit android TV boxes that facilitate access to pirated content’, she explains.