About

Hernán Felipe Velasco Viveros, legal and compliance officer at AME – the major Chilean renewable electrical energy company – began his career as a lawyer at Carey y Cía as part of the banking and financing team. He then pursued an LLM at the University of Navarra in Spain, before returning to Chile and starting at AME in 2013 as an in-house counsel. Since then he has advised all the entities within the AME Group on several matters, including the development, strategy and legal risk analysis of energy infrastructure projects and transactions related to natural resources and financing processes. He is responsible for the coordination of its internal legal team as well as other teams inside the company, in order to engage important and complex transactions. His practice is focused on the drafting and negotiation of several types of contracts including leases, usufructs and easements related to energy projects; contracts for the sale of energy, EPC contracts and service contracts related to energy projects; corporate restructuring and project financing; commercial and corporate law, corporate governance, regulatory issues and negotiation with stakeholders. In August 2017 he became the most senior legal officer of AME as well as the company’s compliance officer, and in August 2018 he became the head of the legal department. He strongly coordinates the legal department with all others areas of the company, in order to act as a team in all matters, including those that are not outside of the legal department’s traditional remit. He highlights that, ‘I want to believe that the fact that I have been involved in almost all activities of our companies gives a legal overview in several aspects, sometimes not directly related to legal issues, but which in some way needs a legal view or a legal criteria’. Over the last two years Velasco has presided over the negotiation, coordination and closing of an important financing process for an amount of more than US$200m, related to the reorganisation of AME group of companies, which included negotiation and drafting of the relevant contracts, as well as negotiation meetings in New York and Santiago. He has also completed the development and construction of the Santiago Solar Project, which consists of a photovoltaic solar project of approximately 115 MW located near Santiago, within the Metropolitan Region, which included negotiation and drafting of all relevant contracts and agreements, including the financing documents of the relevant projects which are currently in operation. Additionally, he has led the department through its major participation in the development of several other important energy projects in Chile that consider different types of technology. These include several project financing processes which, in total, correspond to an amount of approximately US$1.5bn.