About

Austrian food company Agrana has operated in Romania since 1998 and is now a company listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange market, and the country’s most important sugar producer with over 190,000 tonnes of white sugar produced in the last business year. Current head of the legal department for the company in Romania, Sorina Ilie boasts over a decade of high-quality legal experience. As a testament to her skills, Ilie successfully managed to achieve all targets during a period of limited resources by coordinating the activities of the legal team, an event which gave her the opportunity to test her limits and to increase her capacity to work under time pressure with very few resources. During her time at Agrana, Ilie explains she has been on an ongoing path of developing a vision of creating an atmosphere where: ‘The legal department provide prompt and accurate legal advice and have always a proactive attitude in order to mitigate risks. A better understanding of the problems that the company and its departments are facing, improves also the quality of our feedback to our internal clients’. As a top-quality general counsel, Ilie has been integral to a number of cases, one of them being managing and finalising a share capital increase procedure in an amount exceeding €16m for a company listed on the stock exchange market despite the ‘hostile environment due to the strict approaches of the authorities involved in interpreting the share capital legislation and the opposition of one of the minority shareholders’, she informs. Ilie has also been responsible for transforming the litigation area of more than ten years into a consultancy department, explaining: ‘This change opened up a lot of possibilities for me to develop as a professional, and also from the personal point of view it changed me as an individual: being an in house counsel and working with “internal clients” developed my capacity to listen’.