About

A holding company backed by one of the most prominent and richest families in Portugal, Gestmin operates in diverse areas, with notable investments in the energy, industrials and bulk cereal logistics transportation sectors, amongst others. Core businesses include those dealing with Liquefied Petroleum Gas, plastic moulding and cereal warehousing, and plans are in motion to expand the company’s real estate portfolio and move into other non-core business areas for expansion purposes. The company has also recently built a qualified stake (more than 10%) in CTT, the postal service operator, being its largest shareholder. The Gestmin legal team has undergone a major period of change since legal director and company secretary Ana Maria Ramos took over in 2013. Ramos explains that at this time ‘the structure and scope of services provided by the legal department was very different, and the legal officer mainly coordinated the work of outside counsels and had limited time to support the company in-house, a tendency which has been inverted’. Towards this end, the team added fresh talent to its ranks, including Margarida Begonha in 2014 who is now lawyer and deputy company secretary, and Mafalda Godinho de Matos, a lawyer who joined in 2016. This expansion of the team’s capabilities and talent pool has had a corresponding increase in the team’s influence company-wide. Although some part of the department’s work still consists of the coordination of outside counsel – on daily matters and also on specific transactions – Ramos mentions that other business units now ‘have almost everything reviewed by the legal department, and agreements are reviewed by the legal team prior to them being put through, whereas before this was done after the fact’. This ‘has created a great deal of work for the legal department’, but has placed it in a very important position in terms of its effect on the company’s operations. The team has had highly successful results in terms of its reduction of the company’s costs, especially through clients’ debt renegotiating and restructuring. Alongside this, it has assisted Gestmin, along with outside counsel, in negotiating and safeguarding ‘major acquisitions’ made by the company, and after the deals have been concluded has ‘streamlined the amalgamation into the group’. The team has managed to achieve these and other notable successes through fostering a very close working dynamic that, conversely, prizes effective delegation and splitting of responsibilities. This has allowed the team to deal effectively with the challenges posed from Gestmin’s myriad business concerns.