Sophia Michelaki assumed her current position as general counsel and head of the legal division at DESFA on March 2007 possessing almost eleven years of managing the legal department within the highly demanding environment of the natural gas industry and its ‘complex legal framework’.

In this position she oversees a legal division which covers all areas of energy law, regulatory issues, competition issues, civil and commercial law, expropriation procedures, litigation and arbitration. Her time at DEFSA has seen her involved in cases and projects of major importance; as head of legal coordination in 2006-2007, for instance, she led the procedure of the spin-off of the parent company and the establishment of the 100% subsidiary, which undertook the activities of transmission of natural gas in the Greek territory. Michelaki says this procedure strengthened her ‘skills of proactive thinking for the efficient mitigation of risks and effective means of delivery within very tight deadlines’. As someone who believes that in-house lawyers should play a key role in the formation of the strategy of their company and its decision making, she was integral to the legal department’s restructuring in 2016 to form part of the upper management of the company and was subsequently promoted to a an autonomous “division” of legal affairs.

Most notably, she succeeded to create efficient working teams with colleagues from other European countries with experience in gas transmission activities and in the development of gas hubs, which contributed to the transfer of know-how to the relatively young operation in Greece; ‘we drafted effective standard contracts for gas transportation and regulating of the transmission activity; a challenging task successfully performed with the support of counsels from the UK and Belgium’, says Michelaki.