About

With over 1,000 stores in Latin America, over 125,000 staff and a global revenue of around $19bn, Cencosud stands out as Chile’s largest retail company. Sebastian Rivera’s first spell at the company came in 2001 where he developed special expertise in shopping centre regulation, contract law, litigation and negotiation among others matters. He notes leading the credit cards operation as an important milestone during this spell, as he was working closely with the finance department to implement Cencosud´s new credit card. Between 2009 and 2012 Rivera was general counsel for Sociedad de Inversiones Norte Sur, a diversified investment company, handling business and corporative law, contractual matters, compliance reporting management and public policy advocacy. In August 2012, he re-joined Cencosud as compliance officer and was asked to create the compliance area by developing the main policies and procedures for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) compliance with crime prevention and antitrust rules. ‘Creating a new area is not easy. You must take on challenges and save organisational culture barriers. This appointment allowed me to acquire important tools to relate with internal clients seeking legal advice, and also important knowledge’, he says. In 2013, Rivera added the role of manager for the real estate legal department to his remit – marking his professional development, since this is an area of great importance to the company. According to him, ‘working [in the real estate team] required a very rigorous, precise and highly creative deployment in order to meet the expectations of the business’. His success meant Rivera was promoted again in less than 12 months. He assumed his current position in 2014 as legal manager for Cencosud Chile whilst maintaining his compliance role, and now leads a multidisciplinary team of professionals. He says, ‘from a legal perspective, operating in one of the biggest companies in the country is great but also challenging at the same time, given the growing pace of legislation and the complexities and the risks which it presents for the business’. Rivera has already achieved a great deal in his dual role: he built an ‘efficient, quality- and business-oriented legal department’; he participated in the negotiation of a joint venture with Scotiabank; he led the defence before the Competition Court over an alleged collusion of supermarkets; he was also involved in making a placement of a bond and supported in the sale of a share package of the controller in his ‘most recent career highlight’. He also points to providing legal support for all the areas involved in the functioning of the Costanera Center Tower, the highest building in Latin America, and whose construction cost about $1bn, as another career highlight in a long list of significant achievements. He is currently working on compliance with the latest national laws on food labelling and public parking payments which affects Cencosud’s supermarket businesses, in addition to the day-to-day challenges of legal work in a company of the magnitude of Cencosud.