A successful private practice lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell, Olivier Catherine had a successful opening chapter of his in-house legal career with the E&P division Gaz de France (now Engie) working on large oil and gas projects internationally. He was also the head lawyer in charge of the company’s IPO project and assisted on large acquisitions as part of the company’s supply and trading division, highlighting his excellent credentials prior to beginning his current role.

He joined Bureau Veritas in 2007, and began working on corporate law and M&A before being promoted to the role of general counsel and compliance officer for the government services division and covering Middle East, India, Russia and Africa until 2015. He then assumed the role of group general counsel, risk and compliance officer. He lists one of the favourite projects he has worked on with Bureau Veritas as the revamping of the compliance program in the government services division, which he had a major role in executing. ‘I believe I managed to not only change the internal rules and processes but also, more importantly, to change the company’s culture.

A general counsel must be a vector of change, not only through documents and processes but also through training, interpersonal skills and exemplarity’, he says. Indeed, he has had an indelible impact on the legal function at Bureau Veritas as a whole, and explains how he began to mould the team upon joining: ‘I first started with a basic but essential element: share information and best practices among in-house lawyers. This involves weekly staff meetings and monthly conference calls with the Bureau Veritas legal network across the globe’. He continues to innovate and spearhead new techniques and technologies within the team aimed at improving its efficiency.

‘I also actively supported and leveraged the digitalisation of the legal department, which helped create and update various compliance and risk management-related dashboards for the senior management and board of directors’, he says. Catherine’s tenure at Bureau Veritas has been highly successful, and he has played a key role in some of the most important recent projects by the company: ‘I worked on, and actually managed, what was arguably the largest corporate project ever pursued by Bureau Veritas to date. At the end of 2016, the Group’s parent company Bureau Veritas successfully spun off all its operational and support activities in France through asset contributions into six separate companies. The project lasted 16 months and involved complex regulatory, governance, employment, corporate, tax, commercial, financing, accounting and communication issues’. Catherine has been appointed as group general counsel of Sonepar as of May 2018.