About

Before joining Ultrapar in 2008, Sandra Lopez Gorbe accumulated experience from various other large listed companies including two years in Merrill Lynch São Paulo, as well as law firms across Brazil. In her current role as head of legal at Ultrapar, a conglomerate with subsidiaries in a range of industries, Gorbe leads the legal department of eight staff at the company’s holding level. She has been instrumental in revolutionising the legal department of Brazil’s fourth largest company, and describes that ‘part of the maturation of the legal team has seen improvements in how we play and this means we are closer to the decision-making process and to management’. The legal division at Ultrapar, considered a ‘very good company with a good reputation’ in the market, has refocused its scope and outlined what steps are required in order to progress over the next few years. According to Gorbe, there has been an advance towards a new model of department where the legal team has a say on relevant matters in subsidiaries, a process which Gorbe highlights as her biggest achievement to date. With a mind to providing support that is ‘straight and very careful and conscious with our businesses’ Gorbe explains how their department’s high standards require ‘very good rules and internal controls in place’, in this regard they ‘work closely with the internal audit department and compliance department and have also created committees internally’. Such measures have come about due to several different market influences, which have seen an increase in the importance of legal and compliance departments against the backdrop of a volatile market setting. Appreciating the fact that change is impossible to provide individually, Gorbe is determined to make the legal department ‘more engaged and with a very high level of skills and motivations, you cannot ignore people when creating and implementing change’.