About

Chief legal officer Katia Santis leads Bank of Cyprus’s 23-strong and highly capable in-house legal team spread across three working teams headed by dedicated managers: Vasiliki Kammitsi Michaelidou heads the eight- person banking support team, Elena Nathanael oversees the six-person litigation and restructuring team and Vinia Partassides takes on responsibility for the six-person finance and operations support division. Santis explains that this effective structuring has been matched by technology and software solutions to consolidate on the ability of the team: ‘We have devised three bespoke software systems to assist us in our day-to-day work: one system into which all requests for legal advice from the lines are submitted and delegated to the appropriate team and lawyers for handling, one system whereby all litigation against the group is recorded and monitored and finally a system whereby all court orders for freezing of accounts or disclosure of documents are recorded and monitored’. Its excellent internal processes have been just one factor in the multiple successful projects in which it has been involved in the past two years. ‘As well as working on the largest sale of loans transaction on the island and the sale of overseas businesses’, Santis explains, ‘we have the capital raise and issuing of new bonds projects under our belt among others’. It has also taken a much-expanded legal risk management role in response to the banking crisis in Cyprus in 2013, a challenge which Santis reports the team has risen to extremely well. On the team culture, she reported extremely positively on the impact of this on its successes. ‘There is a culture of team work and cooperation’, Santis says. ‘Although there are three separate teams within the department, there is a lot of cooperation between these and views are exchanged through regular internal meetings to keep all abreast of developments with respect to the group’.