About

Maria Beatriz Beltranena Wer has served as general counsel for Amzak Capital Management for 12 years, where she manages the legal departments, transactions and legal affairs of Amzak’s active projects and investments. Beltranena has vast experience in managing corporate international legal transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, loan syndications, bidding processes, acquisition, real estate and bankruptcy transactions. At the beginning of her position as general counsel and legal director for Amzak, she managed acquisitions of local cable and telephone operators in Central America to consolidate them into Amnet Telecommunication, Amnet was the main asset of Amzak but was sold, first as a minority piece to Mesoamerica, and then in 2008 Amnet was completely sold to Tigo-Millicom. Such transactions required her involvement in the structuring, due diligence, regulatory approvals, preparation and negotiation of legal documents and the process of transitioning the company into new ownership. After the sale of Amnet, Amzak acquired Tricom, a transaction that required Beltranena’s coordination of New York legal counsels and Dominican Republic attorneys to apply bankruptcy regulations in combination with the Dominican corporate aspects to complete the undertaking. After the acquisition, in her capacity as general counsel, she managed the regulatory affairs, litigation and corporate legal needs of Tricom, including leading a group of more than eight attorneys, until they sold the company to Altice in 2014, a transaction that required full dedication of due diligence process, structuring and negotiation. She takes pride in having worked to establish a very experienced team that can easily manage the legal aspects of a newly acquired company. ‘Managing a business is very different than acquiring and selling a company, so the complete cycle has made me a complete generalist in various industries of my private equity career, from de regulated industries to very regulated ones’, says Beltranena. Before Amzak she was general counsel at Citibank; spent six years as country compliance officer of Citibank’s branch in El Salvador, and was a lawyer of the legal department of Citibank’s Guatemalan branch. Her experience as country compliance officer saw her apply US regulations such as Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Anti-bribery and Money laundering in combination with El Salvador’s local regulations. She also served as legal coordinator and director for Citibank Honduras for more than two years. Beltranena was also a senior associate at Consortium Legal where she directed the corporate law department of the firm.