About

An electrical utilities company with a multi-national presence, Iberdrola’s vast operations netted them over €29bn in revenue for 2016, and they are therefore one of the largest and most important companies headquartered in the Basque region of Spain. Indeed, they are ‘the number one European electricity company’ as head of legal services Santiago Martínez Garrido explains. He is Iberdrola’s most senior lawyer, and presides over a large team of 142 lawyers and 64 non-lawyers that bear testament to the company’s large size and complex operations. Julián Martínez-Simancas Sánchez is secretary of the board of directors, and oversees a team of five additional lawyers tasked with managing corporate governance at group level. Martínez Garrido believes the company’s rapid growth over the last 15 years is ‘the result of the combination of its corporate vision, the strategy followed to make this vision a reality, its successful implementation, and ethical values [the legal team] have had to continuously adapt to this growth process in a very effective manner’. The team is known to be innovative, with Martínez Garrido placing their Crime Prevention Programme near the top of a long list of developments that have had significant impact on Iberdrola. The programme, as he lays it out, has ‘the objective of ensuring Iberdrola effectively complies with its duties by establishing the appropriate measures for preventing crime or for significantly reducing the risk of it being committed’. The team also has a major effect on the company’s operations, with Martínez Garrido citing their support of the company’s acquisition and integration of Avangrid Inc., an American electrical utility company as an example of this. The challenge here, he says, ‘is how to manage the coexistence of two listed companies within the same group. The subsequent integration involved the team’s transition to implement integration plans and identify and execute operational best practices… and their work on this particular matter has been superlative from concept to final output’. The team is also highly responsible in their corporate outlook: ‘To merely meet our customers’ expectations is not enough’, he explains. ‘Our goal is to exceed expectations to reinforce the high-trust environment that we are built upon. We want to be part our business’ daily work. We aim for the business to entrust us to listen and help them find the solutions that they are looking for without being a roadblock’. Martínez Garrido believes that ‘all [of Iberdrola’s] lawyers have an excellent education background and good knowledge of various languages… they have all proved to be able to provide efficient legal solutions within the group with results that have been visible both internally and externally’.