About

Starting his career at Norwegian law firm Selmer in 2005 Snorre Valdimarsson focused mainly on finance, debt capital markets and M&A. Part of his work involved advising the former electric company Th!nk where Alf Bjørseth was the chairman of the board as well as one of the largest shareholders. Scatec Solar was founded by Alf Bjørseth through his incubator Scatec and they approached Valdimarsson in early 2009 to take the role as general counsel for Scatec Solar, which at the time was a two year old start up within the solar industry. Since 2009 Scatec has progressed from a startup company to a stock listed international group with infrastructure projects on all continents. It is to this end that his position moved from being the only in-house counsel to oversee a team of specialists as well as being responsible for all compliance matters. Amongst his most significant achievements Valdimarsson structured and completed the first ever export financed solar power plants portfolio in Czech Republic in 2010-2011. Valdimarsson was also behind the structuring and completion of the largest (at the time) solar power plant on the African continent between 2011 and 2012. Integral to the company’s growth, he also led the company through a successful IPO process, transforming the company from a privately owned entity to a publicly traded entity. In hindsight Valdimarsson admits that all the transactions ‘showed me the importance of, as an in-house counsel, understanding the business of the company in detail as well as always having a commercial approach to transactions and weighing the legal risk against the commercial gain as well as the importance of driving a process on behalf of all stakeholders’. Since joining, the legal team has grown together with the company and now consists of five specialists. The team specialises in the key areas of the company namely engineering, production, construction, M&A, project finance and asset management. The wider company has benefitted from shorter lead time whilst at all times being assured that the counsel understands the business elements of the case.