About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

The legal team is structured in two divisions formed by three lawyers each:

The first one being the litigation and regulatory affairs division led by Verónica Rodríguez as deputy legal manager, in charge of overseeing all company’s litigation, including handling of external counselling and administration of litigation budget; with regards to regulatory responsibilities.

The second one is the corporate-commercial division, led by Jenniffer Salazar as deputy legal manager, overseeing all legal aspects pertaining to the company’s commercial transactions, such as supply and distribution chains, real estate, administration of the contracts platform, intercompany transactions and regulated contracts.

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has been involved with in the last two years?

Approval of the network development programme (PDR), included in the Spectrum Concession Contract signed with the government of Costa Rica. By leading the company’s efforts to ensure compliance with legal obligations included in the concession granted to operate Internet Mobile Technologies (IMT) in the country, the legal team was instrumental in assuring legal certainty to almost US$1bn in investments done by Claro group in Costa Rica.

Development of a privacy impact assessment and the implementation of the data privacy programme. The legal team carried out an assessment of all the company’s divisions and operations, aiming to determine any existing gaps between data privacy regulation and actual compliance; once the gap analysis was completed, a data privacy compliance programme was developed under the sponsorship of the general manager, assuring that data accessed from more than one million clients, over 700 employees and several providers and commercial partners is managed and stored in an appropriate manner in compliance with local and international regulations.

Can you sum up the team culture/ethos? Giving some information afterwards about how this is developed.

Claro’s legal team ethos is teamwork. We are strong believers in the fact that teamwork engenders trust and loyalty and these factors are vital ingredients for overall success. By emphasising the collaborative, team-oriented nature of our legal team, we managed to build increased loyalty and trust, which ultimately leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, which in our case translates in adding value to the company’s commercial and financial strategy.

We develop teamwork by promoting specialisation and collaboration through the use of technology, utilising everybody’s strengths and areas of expertise and distributing workloads and responsibilities among all. We believe that when individuals are part of a team that values individual contributions, everyone feels motivated to speak up, participate, and share what they know. Information is shared among the team members, maximising levels of knowledge and learning. The stronger team members effectively improve the weaker.

Focus on… INDUSTRY STATUS RECOGNITION

The importance of industry status recognition for telecommunications companies Rarely our country has seen such a large flow of investment in such a short period of time, as the one experienced since the liberalisation of the telecommunications monopoly. We have witnessed the creation of a virtuous circle of investment-technological transformation-employment-social mobility produced by the telecommunications industry, through an enormous inflow of investments done by the telecommunication companies (telcos) in infrastructure, engineering, construction, networks, transmitters and receivers, software, hardware and firmware, enabling them to offer the Costa Rican consumer a product that evolves day-by-day driven by technological advances. Industrial activity implies transformation. Telecommunications, including mobile communications, messaging, data transmission and internet services, among others, always and in all cases implies a physical transformation of signs, sounds and signals, which are sent, received and transmitted through conductive wires, radio waves or other electromagnetic systems. These constitute telecommunications networks that transform signals into codes that are intelligible to the human brain and that achieve the phenomenon of communication, reproducing a natural and human process through technological means. Thus, through this process, the human voice diffused by analogue and digital electric waves, as well as the contents of information such as images and texts, are transformed for a digital treatment that allows for their reproduction and transmission. Moreover, an industrial process requires machinery and human resources; and in telcos, the electronic technology used in the process of collecting, transforming and transporting information from one side to another, is controlled and supervised by trained personnel for its operation and maintenance. All of this leads us to categorically affirm that in accordance with the rules of science and technology, incorporated in our public administration general law, the transformation process carried out by the telcos is undoubtedly an industrial process. In spite of the above, government authorities, specifically the tax administration, have refused to recognise the industrial nature to telecommunications companies, as it has done in the past with other sectors such as the tourism industry, in which the said transformation process is less evident and does not produce such a direct impact on the productive processes of the other sectors, as do telecommunications that have a transversal application throughout the economy. Now, what is the importance of telecom industry recognition for the country companies? As stated above, the economic and social development of Costa Rica has received an important boost with investments done by the telcos, creating the virtuous circle of investment-technological transformation-employment-social mobility. This has allowed the country to take a qualitative and quantitative leap in education, access to new technologies, employability, capacity building, among other fields, which we must not only preserve but also strengthen. It is important to understand that in order to achieve the above, very strong investments are required that must be maintained over time so that the telecommunications industry can meet a growing demand by Costa Ricans, who have proven to be sophisticated and intensive in the use of new technologies. For telecommunications companies, being declared by the tax authority as industrial, would allow them to deduct their pre-operative losses in accordance with the provisions of subsection g) of Article 8 of the Income Tax Law. Doing so, will allow this dynamic and important sector to reinvest those losses in order to continue feeding the virtuous circle we have been talking about and thus continue to satisfy and improve the supply of state-of-the-art telecommunications services. Costa Rican tax authorities must understand with total clarity that the need to solve the serious fiscal situation faced by the country, should not be at the cost of reducing competitiveness, with measures that seek to bring fresh resources to the treasury in the short term, but that can affect economic development, innovation and access to cutting-edge technologies in the medium and long term. We trust that the government will be up to the occasion and will recognise the industrial nature of the economic activity developed by the telcos and their contribution to the development of the country.