About

A team of 10 professionals working at the company’s Paris headquarters, with another 30 located across the wider Group, Sonepar’s legal team contributes a truly global legal resource and has a high level of coordination with the senior management of the business. Group general counsel Olivier Catherine reports directly to the CEO, is a member of the Group’s executive committee and attends all audit committee and board meetings. The team in the Paris headquarters includes legal and compliance vice president Vanessa Sansen, risk and insurance vice president François Beaume and securities service manager Caroline Hoang in the senior positions who all report to Catherine, a highly competent department by all accounts. ‘The legal team has significantly expanded in the last two years, with the creation of various key roles in the fields of law, compliance, risk and insurance which all report to me’, says Catherine. ‘The company has in just two years moved from possessing a basic and small team to one that truly reflects the blue chip company that it is’. When discussing the main advancements the team has made in terms of its processes and methods in addition to its expansion in size, Catherine first mentions the reinforcement of the compliance programme. ‘It includes the upgrading of our code of conduct, the drafting of specific ethics policies, the updating of our corruption risk mapping and the development of our third parties assessment’, he says. ‘It not only involves the legal department but also almost all other support functions – in particular risk management, internal control, internal audit, HR and IT. It has already had a significant and positive impact on the company’s culture and way of doing business, which I consider as very rewarding as a general counsel. In addition, we are actively moving towards the digitisation of the legal department.’ These efforts have been recently recognised as Sonepar has been the first French company ever to have had its compliance programme approved by the Enforcement Committee of the French Anti-corruption Agency under the Sapin 2 Law.