About

Legal director Ivan Dilly leads the legal team at Rolls-Royce Brazil, which currently is comprised of a structure of three lawyers, plus one project executive and one analyst supporting the world famous engineering company’s operations in the country, including its power systems business (the world-renowned “MTU” range of reciprocating engines). At the centre of many complex and important transactions, Dilly chooses to highlight the team’s work on the recent sale of Rolls-Royce’s energy business to Siemens, and the ongoing restructuring of the company in the region, which has resulted in a continuously increasing demand for legal support in all different areas of law. Taking a holistic approach, Dilly explains that the team is guided by ‘excellence and customer focus’ in line with the values of the Rolls-Royce business. A highly flexible team, the nature of support on behalf of Rolls-Royce Brazil is provided in a multidisciplinary and multijurisdictional fashion, Dilly states that ‘we have a global operation and even the decisions that are taken locally could affect our businesses globally’, which means that whatever the legal team in Brazil does could create worldwide impacts with regards to other geographical locales of the business, displaying the scope and influence it has. This collaboration within the Rolls-Royce business is especially important as the company undertakes such a broad range of affairs – civil aerospace, defence, marine, nuclear, power systems (through MTU, which manufactures large diesel engines and complete propulsion and drive systems for marine applications, for heavy land, rail and defense vehicles, and for the oil and gas industry), supply chain, finance amongst others all demonstrate the range of support is required. Dilly and team mitigate these challenges through ‘being able to provide and speak to the customer’s language, [acting] in a prompt way to do business in terms of this support’. Establishing and maintaining close relationships with business leaders in numerous jurisdictions is an important part of this process, and Dilly can point to ‘tangible impacts in all areas, as legal leads the relevant projects and is indeed central to them’. Speaking to the environment in which the team does business, Dilly explains that the various challenges presented to Rolls-Royce and other businesses operating in the country are providing windows of opportunity. He claims: ‘Political issues in Brazil along with new anti-corruption laws and regulation changes are such that we could talk about them for hours. These have all impacted our business but in my view it has been for good, the challenges we’ve faced in Brazil will ensure that our business is more compliant and successful in the long run’.