About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured? Airbus in India has a strong presence across its three business divisions (commercial aircraft, helicopters, defence and space). The customer service organisation supporting commercial aircraft’s is a growing vertical too with flight training, simulators, service support and more. It also has strong engineering, procurement as well as information management teams supporting local-for-local and local-for-global initiatives. The legal team is structured as follows: Himani Gupta, company secretary and legal counsel based in Delhi, leads all corporate governance matters and is the point of contact for helicopters and customer service organisations. Riya Lala, lawyer, is the point of contact for all procurement, information management and real estate related matters. She is also based in Delhi and supports compliance and other commercial matters (on a needs basis). Shohini Sengupta is the lead for all compliance matters be it training, investigations or reporting across the region. In addition, she supports the engineering and HR organisations. She is also the point of contact for Bizlab – an incubator for aviation entrepreneurs supported by Airbus. Nisha Vishwa provides administrative support to the team, is the communication point of contact and is supporting the preparation of posters, training material and other newsletters. Lubinisha Saha handles a lot of the strategic pieces around offsets in India, defence deals, joint-venture related discussions, building and implementing a compliance plan and leading initiatives to structure and streamline the function.

Though the regional team is lean, we work very closely with the divisions and headquarters where a lot of functional expertise vests. What recent political, economic or regulatory changes in India have impacted your company and the team the most? Aviation continues to be the focus of the government as the sector can be seen from the budget with a focus on raising FDI limits in civil aviation and make policy changes to energise the MRO and aircraft lease financing industries. The defence budget continues to be the same but we are seeing active progress on that. Defence procurement would be good for us as a company as well as the overall impetus on the sector be it financing, fiscal incentives, industrial corridor or more hubs and airports would only grow the sector and really make India a strong region for us. What will be the main focus for the company in
the next 12 months and how does the team
intend to assist with this? Broadly speaking, the three growth areas are commercial aircraft campaigns and customer service packages, growth in information management and lastly, defence procurement. We have identified legal SPOCs for each of them. The SPOCs will work and align to the plans, targets and overall focus of each of the teams; such as being a part of the staff catch-up of each of these divisions so as to integrate better and thereby understand the business triggers and priorities. Work closely with business teams and be involved at the outset on strategy and structure and not only for drafting and reviewing contracts. The idea is to partner with business effectively to find risk abated solutions. Can you sum up the team culture/ethos? Giving some information afterwards about how this is developed. The team works on a circle of trust. The basic tenant of which is “we don’t talk about others in this team nor do we hear anyone talking about this team from anyone.” It’s a small team and we want it to be an impregnable fort.

We have established the following to build a culture of transparency and openness: annual targets broken up into quarterly goals with linked KPIs, monthly team meetings where we discuss and update each other on topics and discuss a new topic of learning, weekly individual catch-ups with team members and quarterly catch-ups on goals progress. We do a lot of get-togethers and fun stuff when we meet. It helps bond the team and makes working fun. All this builds a culture of respecting differences between team members and embracing the differences.