Fortune Global 500 listed Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei recently surpassed Apple and became the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and has relied on the expansion of its subsidiaries and international market growth to achieve its goals. Leading the legal support to Huawei across Greece, Cyprus, Malta and Israel is Dionysios Pantazis, who handles the entirety of the organisation’s legal affairs within the geographical cluster across its three main business divisions – carrier, mobile and enterprise.

Speaking to the specific work projects he has recently been involved in, Pantazis explains the myriad of ‘complex regulatory issues pertaining to the telecom industry to public tenders, marketing, IoT, privacy, the launch of new features, products or services, consumer protection, marketing and advertising, [and] antidumping and competition law’. He explains that his workload requires him to maintain good relationships with senior external businesspeople, via ‘extensive contract negotiations with executives from the major players in the industry such as Vodafone, Wind, Deutsche Telecom, MTN, CYTA and Forthnet’. He also maintains contact with ‘semi-governmental and governmental agencies for key projects as well as handling litigation and arbitration’. Pantazis has a number of highlights throughout his in-house career that has spanned nearly a decade, in particular citing his work in ‘shaping law and policy by handling precedent-setting litigations that have an impact on the entire tech and telecoms industry in Greece’.

He also leads the charge in other ways, for example by closing the first ever managed services deal in Cyprus between Huawei and MTN, a deal that was an ‘enormous undertaking’ completed in ‘an incredibly compressed timeframe’, along with a variety of local and regional projects, often involving ‘uncommon, unique and novel legal issues across different legal systems’. In addition to his role at Huawei, Pantazis is an active member of the wider in-house legal community in Greece, frequently giving speeches at IP law conferences and technology events as well as contributing insights and expertise to leading global publications such as the World Justice Index and the World Bank. He won the “Outstanding Individual Legal Counsel” award for his contributions to Huawei in the calendar year of 2017, an award bestowed by Huawei headquarters.