About

The legal department at Grupo Prodeco, the wholly owned Colombian subsidiary of multinational commodity trading and mining company Glencore, is an impressive mixture of different skills and talents combining to create an expert in-house legal team. The team is led by legal vice-president Oscar Eduardo Gómez, who is supported by legal manager Natalia Anaya, and is comprised of eight lawyers in charge of different areas and two support staff. Juan González covers litigation, Jader Yubran oversees the mining area, María Caro handles environmental and lands, Álvaro Pupo works on corporate matters, Juan Panesso takes care of procurement and contracting, César Persand deals with rail, fuel and explosives, and José Ospino provides onsite mine support. The team has transformed the manner in which it had been traditionally operating within Grupo Prodeco from an area that used to provide legal support on an “as-required-basis” to an in-house legal team, operating as an internal law firm providing full-time support to each of the aforementioned areas. Gómez says that this enables ‘a client-attorney legal relationship between each of the members of the legal team and the members of the areas that require legal support’. In doing this, the legal team has substantially changed its approach to provide the required in-house legal support by having its lawyers involved in each of the main critical issues and challenges that the company faces from the very start. Gómez explains that ‘this has allowed [firstly] the lawyers to have a direct knowledge of the issues and operation of the Prodeco Group in order to provide a better and more consistent legal support to allow the company to achieve its objectives. Secondly, this has allowed the legal team to be able to provide a more consistent, timely, direct and complete support on a day-to-day basis by being aware and up-to-speed as to the challenges and requirements that the operations of the companies demand at all times’. The legal team has become an autonomously sufficient team of prepared and updated lawyers capable of providing a complete in-house legal support to all of the companies of Grupo Prodeco. Over the last year the team has been working on an international arbitration initiated by Glencore International and CI Prodeco against the Republic of Colombia, filed before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), for the alleged breach by the Republic of its obligations under the Swiss-Colombian treaty for the protection of reciprocal investments. At the time of writing, the final award is currently pending.