About

General counsel of Cerro Matoso, a large Colombian ferronickel mine owned by South 32 Mining (formerly BHP Billiton), Nicolas Rubio has made a significant impact on the legal function during his six and a half years in the role. He has made the legal department an integral part of senior management of the company whilst simultaneously achieving a degree independence, allowing Rubio to provide ‘proactive’, rather than ‘reactive’ advice. Rubio also integrated the Colombian legal department into the group’s legal department, thus making it part of a worldwide group of lawyers with a global vision of the issues at hand. On a more practical side, Rubio has implemented the anticorruption policies of former owners BHP Billiton into Cerro Matoso, has standardised contracts and has implemented a strict cost control of external advisers using fixed fees and periodical reviews of timesheets. Apart from these operational improvements, Rubio has completed the renegotiation with the Colombian government of the mining lease under which Cerro Matoso operates, without which the operation would have stopped immediately within a year and international litigation would have ensued. This allowed the company to focus on the operation with legal stability until at least 2029, and possibly 2044. This renegotiated contact has become a standard for the renegotiation of large-scale mining contracts in Colombia.