About

Giovanni Barone is the legal affairs director for The Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company in Italy, and the business – a bottling partner of The Coca‑Cola Company – relies on Barone and his legal team of six lawyers and a trainee to provide legal support in the Italian region to one of Coca-Cola’s biggest business partners. Receiving internal recognition by the company’s top management at European level – the Italian legal team was named as being the “Best Legal Team of the Year 2016” within the group – the team provide ‘proactive, pragmatic and business-minded advice to top management and other company functions, at the most competitive cost while protecting the company from risk’ according to Barone. Having a central role in important transactions for the company, including closing the sale of part of the company’s water business for an aggregate price of €3.7m, the team constantly proves their tangible business impact, the team also had an input in many new guidelines spanning specific internal business areas. Barone claims there was a ‘significant renovation of the compliance package for other business functions including guidelines on data protection, new competition law guidelines in relation to specific business areas, new dawn raid guidelines, new labour law guidelines, new guidelines on commercial and procurement contracts’. These new guidelines have been deployed throughout the company via ‘dedicated training’ to each relevant function, as well as follow up meetings and brainstorming, proving the team’s collaborative ability and excellent implementation skills. Giovanni Barone is stated to have significantly impacted on the team culture by instilling more pragmatism, cohesion, law firm type efficiency and closer regular alignment with the commercial team. Paolo De Luca, focused on HR and labour matters as well as data protection, has successfully provided new governance, structure and strategy to labour law litigation and data protection internal management. Ilaria De Rossi, focused on corporate governance, compliance, quality and financial matters, has provided strong leadership and guidance in key legal areas which could potentially raise relevant exposure for the company in case of breaches of applicable law.