About

Alfredo Apestegui is a lawyer with over 14 years of professional experience in legal and tax matters in the US and in Latin America. He joined the leading Central America private equity and advisory firm, Mesoamerica, as chief legal officer in May 2014 as head of all legal, tax and compliance matters involving the firm, its private equity investment vehicles and portfolio companies. When he joined there was no legal department. ‘The biggest task was to earn respect and trust from the organisation’, says Apestegui ‘I believe that this was primarily accomplished by portraying myself as any other member of the business team, rather than establishing a legal department that was isolated from the organisation’. As a result the organisation benefited because the legal and compliance function became an ‘inherent’ part of the business teams, where he can add most value. Although Mesoamerica is a private equity firm with more than twenty years in the market, for the past four years, the firm entered into a partnership with a world-class institutional investor, one of the two pension funds in North America, which required a deep transformation of the firm’s approach towards legal compliance and reporting. Over the past three years, Apestegui has led the formation of a private equity fund with one of the most regarded global pension funds as their lead investor. He has also been instrumental in two portfolio company acquisitions in Chile, and one exit in Central America, as well as leading the negotiation of financing arrangements for the fund and for the portfolio companies, leading several due diligence projects in Mexico, Colombia and Chile. Before joining Mesoamerica, Apestegui served as the senior tax counsel and head of tax strategy for Latin America and Caribbean at American International Group (AIG), based in New York and Miami. For three years he was in charge of providing strategic tax guidance to senior management on a global and regional level, as well as developing local tax perspectives for the Latin America region, covering 15 countries. Apestegui also worked for four years as manager in the M&A tax practice at Ernst & Young (now EY) LLP’S New York office, where he led and managed global M&A tax structuring and due diligence projects, as well as corporate reorganisations, from a US domestic and international perspective.