About

ABB is a world leader in electrical infrastructure engineering production with a major presence in Latin America. Its legal team in Colombia and Ecuador has been involved in continuous changes and challenges with the acquisition of several companies such as Thomas and Betts, Baldor and a portion of GE, as well as the recently announced sale of ABB’s power grid business to Hitachi. It is a team that has to be able to adapt quickly in a continuous changing environment, including clients who have also changed becoming more digital and faster. Led by legal and integrity manager for Colombia and Ecuador, Juan Pablo Mora, the team consists of two lawyers and two compliance specialists reporting to the Latin American legal and integrity manager in Brazil Luis Radulov and Ramón Monrás, Latin American group president in Colombia. In the last year, the team has worked on numerous important transactions and issues including the local acquisition of GE’s IS business, the contract to electrify the PSA Terminal in the port of Panama for US$12m, as well as the contract for an Alupar substation worth US$10m. The team was also part of the “Empresas Activas Anticorrupcion” (Active Companies Against Corruption) by the Transparency Secretariat of the Presidency of Colombia and the UNODC “Towards Integrity” and ICC committees against corruption. In one particular transaction Mora identifies that his department ‘guided the negotiation of a frame agreement with ISA which will represent almost US$200m for ABB in all Latin America, taking the leadership for Chile, Peru and Colombia’. He adds that, ‘trust leads to innovation and better performance’, highlighting that breaking away from the traditional desk hours approach to productivity is a valuable change to the legal working culture in Colombia.