About

The Brazil legal director for chemicals company Yara International is Gianfranco Cinelli, and from his base in São Paulo oversees a legal team of 16 lawyers and six non-lawyers at the industrials and environmental solutions multinational and describes the overarching mission of the team as being ‘a complete and up to date business partner that fits all business and decision-making needs, challenging ourselves permanently in search of continuous improvement’. Citing four major M&A transactions in recent years, the team is commended for its support at all stages including during ‘external firm hiring, negotiation of the transactional documents and multijurisdictional antitrust clearance’, as well as the challenges of ‘proper post-merger integration – cultural and functional’. The aforementioned transactions include Yara’s acquisition of the fertiliser business of Bunge in Brazil and Paraguay, the acquisition of OFD Holding, which expanded Yara’s fertiliser production facilities in Colombia and the purchase of other distribution companies across Latin America. Displaying its ability to enable the business to reach its investment goals, the team was present during the ‘complex’ infrastructure contracts to support existing fertiliser plants in southern Brazil, a greenfield phosphate rock mining project in Minas Gerais and a new liquid fertiliser plant in São Paulo. In addition to these impacts the team also led negotiations with ‘an important client undergoing financial distress’ and managed to secure ‘very good’ conditions that meant there was a ‘reduced financial impact to the company’. Cinelli is proud of his team’s efforts both individually and collectively, and chooses to shine a light on Andressa Gudde who ‘drives the labour practice, from preventive [measures] to litigation with a hands-on approach’, Rafael Martins – ‘providing great to help on the integration process of Galvani, while also bringing Galvani’s legal department several improvements’ – and Rafael Cesar, ‘recently integrated as Yara’s legal manager, he has been working on contract managing innovation such as electronic signature process and software improvements, while also reassessing existing sales models to propose new legal alternatives on sales representatives and distribution contracts’.