Assuming the role of head of legal at Privalia Group in November 2017, following a near seven-year tenure at Stock Spirits Group, Margarita Minguez took charge of a team of six employees scattered across Barcelona, Brazil and Mexico. A firm believer in establishing a close relationship between legal and commercial functions, Minguez achieved a noticeable improvement in cross-departmental communication lines: ‘As an in-house counsel I do not understand when the legal role is removed from the business and as a result, I have encouraged more frequent and direct contact with the business units to better understand their ways of working and their challenges, enabling us a more proactive and practical action,’ she says.

Minguez has also sought a closer access to the group’s strategy, ensuring that legal input allows for the legal department to turn from a reactive to a preventive role which always proactively works with the stakeholders to ensure business objectives are achieved within compliance and regulatory limits. Noticeable transactional achievements for Minguez from the past three years (including her period at Stock Spirits Group), include: multiple financing operations (the last one of which was the negotiation of a syndicate loan for a total of €220m); the €5.5m asset acquisition of Prazska vodka, Nordic Ice and Dynbyl gin in the Czech Republic and an acquisition of Imperator, the leading herbal liquor producer in Slovakia. Minguez is currently in the process of adopting GDPR, a project of the utmost importance for a company with a database of six million users.