About

After around a decade in private practice in corporate M&A, private equity and other financial law, Preeti Balwani moved in-house in 2016 and has been in her current role at Heinz India since 2017. Balwani’s role comprises all of the ethics and compliance matters as well as all other legal matters in the day-to-day running of the business. After the company received an anonymous complaint on its ethics and compliance hotline Balwani led an investigation which exposed a series of distributor malpractices. The forensic investigation was cross functional which posed a host of challenges including a potential data privacy breach, a cyber-security threat and reputational risk. On this issue Balwani says that, ‘this investigation helped groom my ability to have a streamlined approach to problem-solving and being decisive. My understanding of the rules and the processes helped me simplify the processes and risks involved to the business team which helped us take decisions quicker. We were eventually able to blacklist the culprit quickly and effectively prevented loss of reputation’. The legal department under Balwani’s direction also initiated and under-took a company-wide legal, regulatory, corporate secretarial audit for the first time in the history of the organisation. The audit helped identify current and potential company risks, compliance gaps and helped the team to be pro-active in areas that could have a business impact. The department transitioned the compliance process to technology to ensure timely alerts and efficient management of the company’s over-all statutory compliances which in turn helped the business plan other activities better. When Balwani joined Heinz there was a very high volume of litigations and under her direction, the legal department undertook a task to handle all cases expertly. So far it has been successful in reducing the number of legal vendors, closing long pending litigations and in turn saving the company recurring costs of litigation. This has also contributed to reducing the contingent liabilities of the company by successfully closing out litigations. Additionally, the legal department made and is executing a plan to buy back the brands. The legal department recommended that cash balances in the company could be used to purchase the brands from the shareholder at an efficient tax rate which would assist the Indian entity to repatriate cash as well as give the Indian entity independence with respect to dealing with the IPR. Having assisted the company on these important matters among many others, Balwani has impressed a number of peers in India’s legal market.