About

Vice president of the legal department and for corporate governance, and also a member of the executive board at Braskem, Mauricio Roberto de Carvalho Ferro is ‘a delightful person’, who is blessed with ‘one of the best legal minds I’ve come across’ according to one international peer. One of the largest petrochemical groups in Latin America, the company has embarked upon an extensive regional and global growth program, involving Ferro in ‘a number of highly complicated and innovative acquisitions across the region’, as well as several in the US and Europe. These include the largest project financing in the Latin American petrochemicals sector (the Braskem-Idesa consortium’s $3.2bn for development of the Etileno XXI project in Mexico), and more recently, a $290m bid for Solvay Indupa, currently subject to regulatory approval by Brazilian competition authority, CADE and, significantly, Argentina’s stock market regulator, the CNV, where the deal is the first to be subject to new capital markets regulations designed to protect minority shareholders and enacted in late 2013. With former private practice experience, most notably at Bulhões Pedreira, Bulhões Carvalho e Advogados Associados, Ferro has a ‘very collegial way of building consensus and getting people to the right answer’, according to observers, who credit his ‘leading of the legal effort’ as playing a key role in the company’s successful expansion to date.