Focus on: Juan Antonio Castro Molina

Juan Antonio Castro Molina is corporate vice president and general counsel for Intercorp Group. He has previously worked as international associate at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr in Washington D.C. and was Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of Peru in 2001. Juan Antonio received a degree in law from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, a Master of Laws from the University of Virginia, where he attended as a Fulbright scholar, and an MBA degree from the Universidad Adolfo Ibañez. He has also attended several senior management programs at Harvard Business School and The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Juan Antonio has been a law professor at the Universidad de Lima and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.  Juan Antonio has been working for Intercorp since 2004 where he leads the negotiation and execution of Intercorp’s corporate transactions. In addition, Juan Antonio is a board member of several companies of Intercorp Group and other non-for profit organisations such as IPAE, Acción Empresarial, the Cámara de Comercio de Lima. Juan Antonio is also a member to Endeavour Peru and member of the Steering Committee (Peruvian chapter) of Latinamerican leadership Academy.

And what has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year? 

In my role as leader of the legal team for Intercorp Group, I am in charge of facilitating and supporting the group’s growth inside and outside Peru. I am proud to say that our team has been very successful in this role acting as trusted advisors for the group and its principal officers.

One of the most important roles that I have is to look out for the best talent, internally and externally, and provide our organisation with the best team in place, no matter the jurisdiction. This implies to have the best talent in-house to lead all our projects and also to retain the best external teams to advise us in the particularities of each jurisdiction in which we are involved.

One notable event we recently organised was the “Intercorp legal roundtable,” which had its first edition in 2018. This event brings together legal counsel from the region, even those from countries where we do not have investments, but we might in the future. This has become a sought-after event, with more law firms expressing interest in attending every edition. The latest edition was this year in June at Sherman & Sterling offices in New York. We had prominent lawyers from New York firms like Sherman & Sterling, Debevoise & Plimpton, Simpson Thatcher, Paul Hastings, and Skadden, alongside top law firms from Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and Spain. The purpose of this event is to set relevant topics for discussion that are important for both us and the attendees.

To sum up, nowadays my primary concern lies in providing consistent and high-quality legal services throughout the region amidst our ongoing internationalisation process.