An M&A specialist during a private practice career honed at Spanish firm Garrigues, Joaquin Valcarcel Martinez has deployed his significant expertise in this area for Endesa, when he moved to the in-house team there in 1997, initially to assist the company’s expansion in Latin America and its telecommunication business in Spain.

His role soon took on a more expansive character and he had the opportunity ‘to participate in innumerable M&A projects in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, the US, France, Italy and Ireland’. After the acquisition of Endesa by Enel and Acciona, Valcarcel again had a major role to play, participating in ‘a series of transactions which redefined the asset portfolio of Endesa in Spain and Europe, to comply with antitrust requirements and to facilitate the exit of Acciona from Endesa’s capital stock, which took place in late 2009’. Operating from Enel’s Madrid office since 2015, he is now head of M&A and group significant litigations, and is ‘particularly proud’ to report that he has developed ‘an intense expertise in the litigation side’ of law to complement his vast M&A expertise.

Utilising his skills to improve the legal capabilities of the whole company, Valcarcel has enacted a major restructure of the company’s M&A and litigation elements. ‘I have recently promoted the merger of the M&A legal practice and the major litigation management division in the Enel group, in an unprecedented move in the corporate in-house legal environment‘, he explains. ‘This is proving to be a smart organisational proposal, which broadens the scope of relationships with international law firms and strengthens some professional skills in both areas’.

As well as this, he has assisted in the creation of ‘two international clusters of in-house legal counsel within Enel for the areas of M&A and litigations, with around 30 legal focal points in the different countries and business lines where the group operates. We believe that M&A, legal affairs and litigation are amongst the most global legal areas in our group, and this initiative is aimed at making best practice sharing in these two areas more effective and visible’.