About

A legal team of eight lawyers who is in charge of all the legal matters related to PMI’s business in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. It has five lawyers based in Colombia, two lawyers based in Ecuador and one lawyer based in Venezuela. The team is led by Martin Espinosa, senior counsel for the Andean region. In Colombia, Alexandra Hernandez is the most senior lawyer and she is well versed in Colombian legislation and knows the PMI business thoroughly. Furthermore, Hernandez is a versatile lawyer capable of making the bridge between complex legal scenarios and business solutions. The team also includes Ximena Benavides, a young lawyer who among others is in charge of advising PMI’s business in Colombia on matters related to smoke-free products as well as digital tools. This is an area which requires a great capacity to deal with ambiguity given how novel the products are in the tobacco industry. Stella Mateus among others is in charge of managing litigation which covers several topics such as complex labour matters, taxes, consumer protection issues and others. Juan Lazaro leads on data protection matters which is an area that has rapidly evolved in the last couple of years and requires significant technical expertise. Espinosa leads the whole regional cluster, after being with the company for 12 years and occupying different senior positions. PMI as a whole is undergoing a transformation process to smokeless tobacco products including its IQOS and HEETS products, and the legal department is not the exception. Current tobacco legislation, consumer protection acts, and tax law were all designed with cigarettes in mind and as such, the legal team has a huge challenge in coming up with innovative interpretations that will allow consumers to have access to objective information on this new category. Espinosa identifies that the team ‘works with authorities in order to help them understand this new category and the need to regulate them differently in order to obtain a benefit on public health. If smokers adopt these products it is likely that there will be a benefit for public health. All of the above implies that with the same resources we need to do more work and be much more agile, thus over the past years we have been preparing for this’. The team has been working on its prioritisation of tasks, and new procedural structures designed to focus on complex tasks. While focusing on value added work the team has familiarised itself with tools that are used in other fields such as statistics or scientific analysis in order to help its thought process.