About

Intercorp Peru is the holding company of Intercorp Group, a leading multi-business conglomerate with operations in more than 11 countries throughout Latin America and one of the major financial sponsors in Latin America. Intercorp’s business interests span from investments in sectors as diverse as retail, banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and education. The legal team sees itself a group of enablers and custodians of Intercorp’s success and operates as a highly experienced, gender-equitable and business driven small law firm that assists Intercorp, its presidency and its major subsidiaries in their most relevant matters such as transactions, corporate affairs and corporate governance. ‘We promote and enable the sharing of best practices among our subsidiaries’ legal teams and have created a structure that permits our own internal lawyers to have a professional growth inside Intercorp Group’, says corporate general counsel Juan Antonio Castro Molina. In order to promote efficiencies in pace and work, Intercorp’s legal team has moved from a vertical organisational structure to a horizontal project-based organisational structure which gives it more flexibility and versatility for advising internal clients. ‘Nowadays, our lawyers are not only focused in problem solving but are also involved in the inception, evaluation and structuring of each project, having developed business-related capacities that allow us to challenge, improve and solve non-legal issues’, explains Castro. To reach this goal, it has built a high-performing team that receives permanent training in legal related topics, mainly in leadership skills, digitalisation and trends of the industries that it attends. These efforts are not only being recognised internally by Intercorp’s senior management, but also all over the industry. Intercorp’s legal team has been recently awarded “Deal Makers of the Year” in the industry press, and has also won the award of “Deal of the Year” granted by Latin Finance for its work on the Quicorp transaction. In January 2018, the legal team worked on the acquisition of 100% of Quicorp, one of the largest private pharmaceutical companies in Peru, with more than 1,200 pharmacies and retail distribution operations in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia. ‘The transaction involved four countries and entailed a sophisticated trust structure in Ecuador and Peru that allowed the company to close the acquisition without having to wait for the approval of Ecuadorian antitrust regulation. This provided the company with a competitive advantage that was ‘key to bringing the transaction into a successful closing’, explains Castro.