About

After just one year of impressing colleagues in his previous role as senior in-house lawyer at utilities company Vatia, Alejandro Amelines Guerrero was recommended for the position of general counsel and secretary of the board at Carbones San Fernando (San Fernando Coal Mines) a company that supplies both international and domestic markets with thermal coal. A key feature of his work that stands out is his attitude towards taking on challenges – he identified the following facet of his role as a career highlight: ‘Now that I’m in the mining sector, working in a company with more than 500 employees, the labour law challenges are common so dealing with labour unions representatives, public authorities, unpredictable accidents are part of the daily activities on the job’. Amelines also adds that ‘the most important achievement as a general counsel and secretary of the board of the company has been directly representing Carbones San Fernando in complex disputes and litigations, not only because of the financial risk they represent for the organisation but the fact fortunately we’ve succeeded in all of them, protecting the interests of the shareholders and all the employees’. To date, he has directly intervened in liability disputes which ascend to more than $30m. His success can also be attributed to how he has approached risk management by implementing standardised risk assessment procedures. Summing up his philosophy in this regard, Amelines says, ‘one important task for us general counsels is to correctly assess the potential risks at any level (legal financial, reputational) to the organisation in order to take proper actions if they eventually occur but more important to prevent [them occurring]’. Prior to working in the energy sector he worked in Colombia’s public sector for both the Ministry of Agriculture and the Colombian Institute of Rural Development, empowering and executing the rural and agriculture policies of the government, ‘having the fortune to work side to side with the rural communities’, he explains.