About

‘Filipa is an outstanding performer concerning all the key skills a general counsel should have: ability and wisdom to act as the interface between legal department and board directors; insight to distribute work between internal and external legal teams and, when needed, to put them working together; a broad knowledge of all legal matters from regulation to corporate, through tax and labour among others; all of that with a lot of energy and sense of humour’ one source comments on Filipa Santos Carvalho. An experienced telecommunications lawyer, she joined Optimus Comunicações, the mobile operator owned by Sonae Group, in 1998 shortly after its inception. She held a central role in the creation of the legal department, defining its scope, forming internal policies and templates, as well as constructing the essential relationships with other departments. Following the integration of all support areas of Sonae’s telecoms and IT companies in Sonaecom SGPS in 2003, Santos Carvalho assumed the role of head of the legal department, providing support for all Sonaecom companies (approximately 40). In 2005 she also assumed the leadership of the regulatory department of Sonaecom. Zon Group, the leading cable operator in Portugal, acquired Optimus, a telecommunications company owned by Sonaecom. The merged entity created NOS, for which Carvalho is currently head of legal. Now leading the legal and regulatory department of NOS Group, a company listed in the PSI-20, she oversees the work of a diverse team of 33 people with very different backgrounds, ranging from lawyers, paralegals, economists, engineers and administrative staff. Throughout her in-house career Santos Carvalho has been at the centre of all of her companies’ most important moments. One example is the aforementioned merger between Zon and Sonaecom’s businesses in 2013. ‘It was a huge challenge for the legal and regulatory team. The merger implied the approval from the National Competition Authority and the Regulatory Authority, an achievement that we completed in only seven months. That is a record for the National Competition Authority when analysing complex operations’ she says. A private practice source comments on that deal and Santos Carvalho’s role: ‘The consolidation of the merger between Optimus, one of Sonaecom’s units, and Zon was certainly the most striking positive achievement of 2014 amongst the universe of large Portuguese corporations. In this process, Filipa Carvalho, in her capacity as legal and regulatory director, was absolutely decisive. Even though she belonged to the smallest of two companies involved in the merger, Carvalho was rapidly able to take leadership in her areas of responsibility at the new company NOS. This was possible, due to her expertise and know-how in regulatory matters and her ability to coordinate in-house lawyers and external consultants’.