About

After 10 years at international law firms including Clifford Chance and Chiomenti, Andrea Navarra moved in-house in 2008 and became head of corporate, legal and compliance for Italy and related countries at the British multinational International Power. He then moved to ERG in 2013 serving in different roles before becoming group general counsel in 2016. Joining ERG gave Navarra the opportunity to expand his expertise and deal directly with regulatory and compliance issues of a holding company listed on the Milan Stock Exchange and operating in different jurisdictions. This multi-jurisdictional experience led him to thrive in the group general counsel role responsible for all the legal affairs of ERG’s primary energy production in seven jurisdictions. As general counsel of the company Navarra has created a new corporate and legal affairs department merging together the different corporate and legal units that previously acted as separate operating group companies. This was part of an important internal re-organisation project called “One Company”, which simplified ERG’s corporate group structure and a reduction of the number of subsidiaries. In this way, the corporate and legal affairs department was “put together” and was therefore in the best situation to share experiences, to support each other, to increase synergies from different areas of the whole team and, most of all, to have a common approach within ERG in terms of legal risk management. ERG was therefore able to complete, during Navarra’s tenure, its industrial transformation from a primary Italian oil company, with an integrated and complex downstream network, into a primary European energy producer from renewable sources. Such a big change was supported through extraordinary M&A transactions for an overall value of approximately €10bn. During the last three years Navarra had a leading role in some of the most important deals of this kind including the sale of the refinery assets to Lukoil, the purchase of the Italian hydro assets from EON, the purchase of French and German wind assets from different sellers, the sale of TotalERG and its integrated downstream network to primary international operators, and the purchase of Italian assets from VEI Capital. About his success, Navarra highlights the efforts of his entire team, explaining that ‘the results that our legal and corporate department achieved over the last few years were possible just thanks to the extremely high commitment and professionalism of all the members of our team, at any level’.