About

Ana Sílvia Dias Haynes is a Brazilian qualified lawyer with over 22 years of experience working for and advising multinational and Brazilian-based companies in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. She practiced in the São Paulo office of Baker & McKenzie between 1997 and 2005 as part of the energy and infrastructure, M&A and corporate practice groups. In 2005 she joined BG Group as legal manager for mid and downstream businesses, involving the structuring and negotiation of energy and gas supply agreements, deals to deliver energy and cogeneration solutions to industries and commercial business in Brazil, as well as vehicular natural gas to gas stations throughout the country. While at BG she was promoted to lead the BG Group South Cone legal projects, including their shareholding position at the largest gas utility of Comgás as well as other Brazilian and Bolivian legal matters. She joined Diageo in 2007 to work as senior legal manager for Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil but in 2010 moved to the company’s head office in London as their legal counsel for corporate, compliance and audit support team. While at Diageo she participated in the auditing of the Latin American business and important M&A projects in the region. She returned to Brazil in 2014 and since then has been the general counsel and compliance officer for Essilor in Latin America, working on several M&A deals. With the HR department she has developed its “Somos Essilor” compliance program in the region and has helped to shape the compliance culture of the business to achieve their mission of “improving lives by improving sight”. She manages a team of 11 lawyers and two paralegals in Rio and Manaus, Bogotá, Miami and San José, with one further recruit planned for Mexico City in 2019. In the past four years Haynes and her team have orchestrated the completion over 20 M&As, restructurings, expansion transactions and operational projects of the Essilor Group in Latin America. She has also worked with the legal team at Essilor’s headquarters on the approval by the relevant antitrust authorities of the Essilor and Luxottica global merger, estimated at €46bn, and implementing the required structuring of the local business in the Latin American region for this. Under her direction the team averaged five to eight M&A agreements per year, in approximately 11 different countries in the region. On her strategic vision for the legal function at Essilor, Haynes says that she makes sure she has ‘the best equipped team to consistently deliver great performance, building with them such purpose and understanding as true business partners that drive and implement innovative legal solutions and compliance practices to the various internal and external clients’. She adds that she is, ‘constantly motivating and providing training and education available to all team members and [herself] as their leader to ensure [they are] updated and improving work quality and knowledge every-day’.