About

One of the larger in-house teams in the region at 34-strong, Hellenic Petroleum’s legal team brings real internal clout to bear on the myriad issues it undertakes on behalf of Greece’s premier oil and petrochemicals company. Ioannis (John) Apsouris is the group general counsel and is an experienced lawyer who has worked both in private practice and as in-house counsel and is prized as a business oriented lawyer who consistently brings measurable results. The rest of the team is organised around specific business areas with legal leads for these; Dorina Papadimitriou is the manager of international business activities and the financial services legal division, Alexia Trokoudi, is the head of the legal division on energy regulation, Ioannis Voskos, is the group director of the retail legal division, Sofia Vassilatou is group director for real estate property and installations and Alkis Poulias leads employment matters legal support. The team has been indispensable to the successful completion of a number of major projects on behalf of Hellenic Petroleum, but December 2018 saw it finalise a particularly important chapter for the company with the sale of the participation of Hellenic Petroleum in DESFA to a consortium of international investors. ‘This was a €535m project involving various complex contractual and regulatory issues both in the national and EU level that, was handled in-house since 2015’, says Apsouris when discussing this major milestone. A highly rationalised legal function, he quotes the team’s motto as ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. He adds that ‘all members of Hellenic Petroleum legal team work as one person in order to bring measurable results for the group’ in conclusion.