About

Having amassed approximately two decades of experience working for international mining companies and operations in the north of Chile, Gonzalo Montoya Cisterna first joined the multibillion-dollar revenue mining titan Antofagasta Minerals as legal manager (assuming responsibility for legal advisory services for four group companies) in November 2016. Montoya has been extremely active since joining, being the catalyst for the latest evolution of the Antofagasta Minerals in-house team. ‘One of the major changes I have made to the internal workings of the legal function has come through the development of a new model of legal services’, Montoya explains. He says this is ‘based on providing relevant legal needs for several operations which has facilitated the development of new best practices, cost optimisation and the dissemination of updated corporate policies throughout the company’. Throughout his career, Montoya has been highly successful in training and leading multidisciplinary work teams that address the usual legal requirements of a mining operation, as well as other contingencies that may arise. He has done this both at established operations such as Escondida and “from-scratch” projects such as Cerro Casale. Both types of company have provided him with invaluable experience, he believes: ‘The former category allowed me to perceive the importance of the connection between legal services, in terms of opportunity and quality, with the mining plans of the operation. The second allowed me to visualise the insertion of a new project in an unknown environment and to manage legal need in this context’.