Team size: 11

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Our routine legal work includes negotiating high volume client contracts; helping the business pursuing legitimate claims against clients; mitigating risks such as defending million euro claims against the company; and avoiding fines and disciplinary measures of supervisory authorities (labour and anti-money laundering). Aside from this, we developed a risk analysis approach following a holistic approach. It comprises enterprise risks as well as legal and compliance risks. The approach combines bottom-up results provided by all employees through questionnaires, with the top-down risk assessment of the business executives and the legal and compliance team based on experience and the assessment of likelihood and damage amount of risks. The aim is to identify risks and enable mitigation in cooperation with the affected business lines. Furthermore, it allows us to measure the compliance culture of the organisation, and the knowledge of compliance policies, as employees are being asked to solve specific dilemma situations. Finally, employees are asked to evaluate their managers with regards to their adherence to compliance rules and their engagement in communicating. The exercise will help us to assess the impact of the compliance work we put into the company and make it measurable.

We engaged in real estate associations aiming at professionalising the real estate sector and raising awareness for compliance needs. As chairman of the compliance working group of the institute for corporate governance in the real estate industry (ICG), we developed best practices and whitepapers on the prevention of anti-money-laundering (AML) and state-of the art compliance (for example, guidelines for setting up a whistle-blower-system). Furthermore, we developed and held webinars on AML and compliance-related topics. These training courses are unique in the real estate sector, as they are real case-based training courses, that contain the experience and input of compliance experts in the real estate industry. The aim is to develop standard knowledge and tools for the real estate world, to professionalise the participants and help them meet legal requirements.

Together with our colleagues from other real estate companies, we form the legal and compliance initiave real estate. We managed to influence the AML-legislation and imposed obligations with respect to brokers. We were also invited to represent the real estate industry in the recent financial action task force on money laundering (FATF) Germany audit. We were interviewed by a delegation of FATF members, trying to assess the awareness of AML regulations amongst real estate companies. The result is a positive assessment of the FATF regarding bigger real estate companies and their understanding of AML risks and measures of prevention.

With our sustainability business leaders and members of the ICG, we work on developing a whitepaper guideline on how ESG has an impact on real estate companies, how to set up a good governance to implement environmental, social and compliance risks into the business model.