About

Ennio Bernasconi is an industry veteran with over 30 years of experience as a business lawyer within a variety of multinational companies. His career started with a brief experience in private practice as a professional lawyer and he then first made the transition to the in-house legal sector in 1984. Through a variety of roles he has been given increasing degrees of responsibility ever since, aggregating significant in-depth experience in the fields of M&A, international contracts, antitrust authorities and governance of listed companies. Currently, he is the senior vice president corporate affairs and group general counsel of Prysmian Group, a manufacturer of electric power transmissions and telecommunication cables and systems across 50 countries. His time in this role is marked by his success in encouraging and making the legal department work as a team while exploiting each individual’s talents. Over the years he has pushed the legal department to be a true partner to the business providing business orientated solution in a pragmatic and timely fashion. ‘The level of recognition, interaction and trust that this approach has created for the legal department within the whole organisation represents, in my view, a great achievement of which I’m most proud of’ says Bernasconi. He has been actively involved in the acquisition by Prysmian of two of its major competitors, namely the Draka Group and the General Cable group, in 2011 and in June 2018 respectively. Bernasconi started his in-house journey at 3M Italia Group in 1984 and then subsequently at multinational tyre manufacturer Pirelli Group in 1990, where he was involved in the divestment of the cables division by Pirelli Group to Goldman Sachs and was later in charge of finding and developing the corporate affairs department of the newly established Prysmian Group. ‘Each of these events represent a landmark in my career entailing each time, more than ever before, adaptation to change and leadership to create a new mind-set and a new way of working first of all for myself, then within my team and, in doing so, hopefully within the whole group’s organisation’ says Bernasconi.