About

Telecommunications firm Tele2 is a pan-European company that has operations in nine countries in Europe and Eurasia, and owing to the sector having large amounts of regulation, requires internal counsel that is adept and forward-thinking when it comes to regulatory issues. With the ability to deal with these regulatory challenges and much more, Stefan Backman is praised for his tenure as general counsel and executive vice president of Tele2, having first joined the Tele2 business in 2007. Since joining, Backman has worked in several different positions in the legal department of Tele2, starting as a legal counsel for Tele2 Sweden and then in 2011 moving up to the head of legal and regulatory position within the subsidiary. In his current role as general counsel for the Tele2 Group, which he began in 2017, Backman oversees a department with six lawyers in total and deals with a number of regulatory and other business-defining challenges. For example, Backman explains how he was a key figure during two ‘major’ M&A transactions on behalf of the Tele2 Group in 2017, one which was a ‘merger with the Swedish cable TV company ComHem, one of the largest mergers ever between two listed companies in Sweden’. He was also central to the company’s recent success in a case heard in the European Court of Justice, related to data retention matters. Of this, Backman explains the way in which he led the case and acted as the spokesman, which has since ‘become an important and well-known precedent in the whole of Europe with a lot of media coverage’. Further illustrating his credentials as a deal-maker, Backman has been responsible for the legal aspects of ‘major network sharing agreements’, many of which have been ‘very ground-breaking’ in the telecoms sector and have also led to substantial cost savings for the Tele2 Group. He has focused on two aspects, combining a ‘business oriented’ and an ‘extremely effective and cost-conscious’ method of service delivery through ‘involving [the] team in the core business and day to day operations and by rationalising to the greatest extent possible’.