About

Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (CCHBC) has a legal function of approximately 100 in-house lawyers operating across 28 countries. The group in-house legal team consists of ten lawyers that are located across Athens, Switzerland, Russia, Bulgaria, Austria and Italy and represent the variety in legal skills and expertise necessary to meet the demanding objectives inherent in supporting the group’s footprint in 28 countries. The Athens-based portion of the team is its largest component in terms of numbers and contains particularly key individuals in deputy general counsel and chief compliance officer Spyros Mello and senior corporate counsel Spyros Zampelis, who both report directly to group general counsel Jan Gustavsson in Switzerland. The third Athens-based team member, Maria Tzavelakou, supports CCHBC’s central goods and services’ sourcing, the total spend for which amounts to around €3bn annually (including sourcing managed locally in the company’s markets), as well as the group’s premium spirits business worth €188m. Zampelis lists just some of the team’s most prominent work in recent months as ‘the acquisition of Bambi – the leading confectionary business in Serbia – for a consideration of €260m, supporting the launch of a number of new products including Fuse and AdeZ, supporting the growth of strategic relationships – with Brown Forman, Campari, Remy and The Edrington in particular – and, finally, launching the group’s GDPR compliance programme’. In 2013, the team also ‘structured and implemented CCHBC’s transformational and ground-breaking re-domiciliation from Greece to Switzerland involving a €6.2bn exchange offer for the shares of Coca-Cola Hellenic and the relisting of CCHBC on London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange with a parallel listing on the Athens Exchange under a new Swiss holding company, and on its related financing and refinancing’. This highly complex and successful operation was lauded throughout the industry press. Internally, the team maintains a high engagement score of 96%, well above industry standards, and has received rave reviews from internal clients with an impressive internal client satisfaction rate of 4.29 out of 5.00. Mello comments that ‘this is the result of a strong culture of talent development, collaborative mindset and individual accountability’. The team maintains a strong focus on improving its legal operations, including its relationship with law firms. It recently completed a group-wide tender as well. ‘This covers all providers for legal services for our 28 countries and group operations – rationalising our external counsel base from 280 to 160 – and has led to considerable cost savings and other benefits such as value-added services during the process’, Tzavelakou explains.