About

A former senior manager in the law department at Coopers & Lybrand Madrid, Antonio Vazquez moved in-house at Kraft as director of legal and corporate affairs for the Iberian Peninsula in 1992. Appointed vice president and chief counsel for Latin America in 2000, since 2012 he has held the same post at restructured (and re-named) entity, Mondelez International, where he has come to be regarded as ‘something of an institution’ in his own right. During this time he has undertaken a number of major transactional and corporate matters, not least Kraft’s separation from Philip Morris, the acquisitions of Nabisco and Cadbury, and the spin-off of US grocery arm, Kraft Foods Group. ‘Latin America brings important challenges every day’, Vazquez notes, and it’s a region where ‘international firms are either absent or uncompetitive due to their high costs, while local firms vary broadly in terms of quality and price’. In such a scenario, as well as implementing new technologies covering knowledge management, documentation and archiving, and contract management (among other areas), and introducing a legal-team specific intranet, he has sought to reinforce local legal capability with ‘flexible and specialised regional resources that work horizontally across the organization’. He regards leading the legal and compliance team as a source of satisfaction, since it’s ‘a team which the executives both trust and value’.