About

As one of the largest real estate developers in Mexico, Abilia’s legal team has been at the forefront of facilitating 15 large-scale projects totalling more than 3 million square meters built in the main cities of Mexico. Upon joining the company in 2012, Claudia Rosso Rizo, general counsel, was tasked with reconfiguring and consolidating the legal team to suit the company’s transition and reorganise the company’s relationships with service providers such as trustees, law firms and banks. Abilia is now engaged in significant projects and is contracting with international investors, consultants and tenants. Rizo initially joined as part of its transition into a full service Mexican real estate development company and says ‘with the support of my colleagues on the senior management team, and my support of them, we were able to lead the company through this challenging period and create an expert and highly focused team in all areas of the company’s business’. Rizo says that in the past three and a half years there has been a huge change in the participation of the legal team in the determination of the business strategy of Abilia. ‘This increase in the role and in the way that the general counsel, and the legal team more generally, is perceived by the business team is for me the best measure of my success’. Under Rizo’s management, the team has been involved in a number of significant transactions, most notably the 2014 sale of two office tower buildings comprising the Terret complex to another German open-ended fund, Deka, which was ranked as the largest single asset transaction in Mexico in 2014.