About

Having worked in-house within Chile’s mining sector since 2004, Manuel Díaz M. has a formidable knowledge of the industry placing him perfectly to advise Goldfields, one of the world’s largest gold mining firms. He joined Goldfields in May 2019 assuming the position of legal, compliance and permits manager for Chile. Having business skills that extend beyond the traditional legal remit, immediately prior to Goldfields, Díaz was regulatory affairs manager for the Spence Growth Option Project. During his tenure there between October 2017 and April 2019, he was a member of the Pampa Norte executive committee. ‘In this role I had the opportunity to put in practice executive and managing abilities beyond my legal knowledge which gave me the possibility to develop skills more related with strategy and leadership, participating actively in decisions making process’, he shares. Before his regulatory affairs manager role, Díaz was corporate legal director at Codelco, the Chilean state owned copper mining company, reporting to the general counsel and leading a team of senior lawyers at corporate level, in charge of strategic legal matters. He identifies this leadership role as career highlight because ‘this experience challenged me to have a very quick adaptation process to a highly different culture and stakeholders compared with private organisations’, he says, adding, ‘the role allowed me to gain a different point of view of the several legal matters related with a company, especially with a mining company, but from the regulator side, helping me to understand the public criteria more deeply’. Between December 2007 and April 2015, Díaz worked at another major miner operating in Chile, BHP, serving as senior counsel in his first five years there before being appointed manager of group legal in December 2012. In the latter role, Díaz was acting as a member of Pampa Norte Assets leadership team and was responsible of regulatory and legal-environment matters for the Chilean operations, explorations and projects of the entire BHP Group. With such a strong and longstanding in-house career in the Chilean economy’s most important sector, it is no wonder that Díaz is ranked among the top counsel in the country. Commenting on his career in general terms, he says, ‘my professional focus have been oriented to identify and manage corporate legal risks and to increase corporate legal department’s productivity’.