About

Carlos Alberto Mechetti has been at publicly-traded, multinational retail company Cencosud for almost 20 years and has been the company’s general counsel since 1999. As such he has been the company’s key legal figure throughout a remarkable period of growth, including the acquisitions of Royal Ahold’s Santa Isabel chain in Chile (2003), G Barbosa in Brazil (2007), Grupo Wong in Peru (2007/8), Supermarcados Cardoso, also in Brazil (2011), and Jumbo, in Argentina (2012). Most recently he led on the acquisition of Carrefour’s Colombian assets, a $2.6bn deal that not only required closure in record time, but which also constitutes the largest acquisition by a Chilean firm abroad to date. He currently manages a team of 30 lawyers (plus a further 15 legal assistants) spread across the foregoing five jurisdictions. One external counsel notes: ‘Frankly, working with him is a pleasure: he expects results but has faith in his external counsel and does not micro-manage; and since he is always so up-to-date with the fundamentals and with all the relevant technical aspects, everything tends to function very smoothly under his leadership’. (Insiders also note that ‘unlike many, he has not forgotten how to ask a question or listen to the answer; he takes opinions into account’). Proud of the development of the legal department he has helped build, he notes that ‘for me, the importance of the in-house lawyer does not reside in the personal, but rather in successfully gaining the company’s objectives at any given moment’. A measure of his success is that during his tenure, Cencosud has emerged as the third-largest retail group in Latin America.