About

A leading light among Indian general counsel, Abhijit Mukhopadhyay has racked up an impressive succession of career highlights and personal accolades, and is involved in a number of international organisations on the back of his exploits in the legal field. A company secretary by age 24, Mukhopadhyay went through a succession of chief legal roles with HMT, Indian Aluminium, Dunlop India, Maruti Suzuki and Ranbaxy Laboratories before originally joining the US$15bn-rated Hinduja Group at its global headquarters in London in 2001. Over the course of his extensive career, Mukhopadhyay has perfected the art of constructing and maintaining a top quality legal department, which time and again ‘improved the knowledge of law and its application considering the commercial requirements of the business’, and has had a similarly positive impact on the Hinduja Group legal department. As he explains, ‘in my present role in the Hinduja Group, I have shifted the working of the legal department from being a legal service provider to someone caring for the businesses by providing value added services to the satisfaction of our businesses. Today, the legal department works for the businesses and not the other way round. There are many occasions where the department worked hand-in-hand with the business verticals and came out with solutions helpful to the businesses to achieve their commercial objectives’. He has also had a direct impact on the strategic direction of the company on multiple occasions, picking one instance out in particular: ‘One of the large Group companies was getting substantial orders from countries placed under sanctions which they had to refuse because of this. I took the initiative of convincing the company to enter into a dialogue with the regulatory authorities which we did and eventually persuaded the regulatory authorities to allow the Group company to export into those countries under sanction by obtaining quick approvals from the regulatory authorities which immensely helped the top line and bottom line of the company’. Outside of his in-house role with Hinduja, Mukhopadhyay lists a number of external appointments as among his premier career highlights: ‘taking the position of global vice chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Commission of Arbitration and Alternative Dispute Resolution as also a member of their Steering Committee, as well as joining in the Advisory Board of ICC’s Indian Arbitration to promote arbitration in India; became a member of the European Advisory Board of CPR Mediation and Arbitration; becoming an executive committee member of the Confederation of Indian Industry; and becoming an advisory council member of the Post Graduate and Doctoral Faculty of Law in The Queen Mary University of London’.