About

The legal team of Publicar Publicidad Multimedia, parent company of Publicar & Gurú Group, is composed of six lawyers led by Andrés Pérez Velasco, who is the company legal vice president. The team is in charge of the legal management of the Group in Colombia and in each of the countries where there are operations, encompassing Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico and Spain. The team is supported by Juan Sebastían Gómez Latorre, who is responsible for legal matters in Colombia, Andrea Sanabria Cancelado who is responsible for Colombian labour matters and Fabián Díaz Hernández who handles corporate matters in Colombia as well as Ecuador, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Based in Colombia with a regional focus are Agustina Borio – who oversees matters in Argentina – and Cristian Andrés Muñoz Gatica, responsible for legal matters for Chile and Peru. The team also leads the support of external lawyers, which involves relationships with approximately 70 lawyers belonging to the best firms in Latin America. Recently, the company has expanded into Uruguay and the Dominican Republic and divested its company in Brazil adding to its already impressive regional scope. This has required the legal team to make changes in its operations. A measurable strategy was defined to prevent contractual and extra-contractual damages of the entity in order to reduce the number of contingencies of the company. An effective risk management policy was harmonised in the countries with operations oriented to an appropriate judicial management, and a value generation strategy was developed to obtain resources for the company based on contractual renegotiations with partners, suppliers and third parties, while identifying legal, regulatory and tax opportunities to add value to the business. From the implementation of the defined policies, savings of US$40m have been generated in changes to lower costs as a result of renegotiation processes. A further US$5m has been generated in value from the opportunities that the regulation offered and that had not been implemented. This has been advanced with the support of internal and external lawyers, along with a judicial management that has allowed the company to have more than 210 judicial decisions in favour of the company in Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and Ecuador, amounting to US$18.5m in the last five years. Velasco identifies that, ‘in the same way from the advice to the internal operation, we have identified opportunities for improvement that we communicate to all the areas involved, to generate learning and promote corrective actions’.