Focus on Elena’s career

Elena Yubero serves as general counsel, chief compliance officer and corporate secretary of Automotores Gildemeister (AG). Given her proactiveness, she can ensure that everything is completed to her company’s satisfaction and through a high degree of flexibility and solution orientation. These are crucial skills for someone in her position of responsibility in a company that has overcome several reorganisation plans over the last six years, including a reorganisation pre-pack, under Chapter 11 in NY, USA previous 2021, a DIP financing, two capital restructuring transaction in 2019 and 2016, among others. As of June 2021, AG has become a subsidiary of Elliott Management, a US investment fund.

Elena leads a team of lawyers serving AG’s regional and functional teams as an importer and distributor of vehicles in Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Brazil. With a presence in China, she is in charge of overseeing all legal matters. She can work with multidisciplinary groups and teams of external counsel in Chile and abroad, negotiate and close deals, and evaluate investment risk. AG is the sole distributor of Hyundai in Chile and Peru and distributes several global vehicle brands such as Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, Yutong, Geely, Mahindra, and many others. Yubero states that it is precisely this ‘demanding international work in a team that she enjoys.

As the company reinforces its existing range of services and develops new ones with cutting-edge trading technology, it is heavily fond of the efficient energy use and electric vehicles market, which is predicted to be a large and incrementally growing market in the near future. One of her challenges is to reach higher standards in safety, environmental laws and compliance matters. The creation of an integrated company with a focus on clients has been consistently posing new challenges for the in-house department, especially consumer and data protection laws.

Elena has an outstanding academic and career background, as a Pontificia Universidad Cattolica de Chile graduate with an LLM in Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat, in Heidelberg, Germany. Before moving in-house, she developed her legal career in the Banking and Finance group at Carey y Cia for more than nine years. Currently, she is a member of the Investment Committee of the Social Investment Fund 1 and 3, a trainer on corruption and prevention for SMEs of the Alliance for Integrity — German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development — and a member of the board of experts, the corporate law department of the Chilean Bar Association.