What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

One of the most significant cases we have been involved in recently concerned the renewal of over 60% of the company’s customer contracts in the last 12-18 months during extremely difficult Covid-times—a massive effort from the legal team in renewing our Unilever contracts in Indonesia, Vietnam and India and directly negotiating and drafting long term and asset heavy property services and logistics contracts with several multinational companies, such as Unilever & Lotus (formally Tesco).

In addition, we have been leading the negotiation, the setup and all legal, labour, IP and commercial matters for an industry-changing JV with Boon Rawd Brewery in Thailand to take over Singha’s beer and water distribution network. Right from the start, the JV was family-led, as both companies involved, despite their size, remain family businesses. Whilst the JV was built on the spirit of collaboration, it was essential to protect the interests of our company, mainly when it came to potential conflicts of interest in overlapping logistics markets and existing and future customers of both Linfox and the new JV company. Pragmatism was important to enable the new JV to flourish. Still, a firm grip on the purer legal elements of the deal was required from the contractual point of view to safeguarding our business. This demonstrates the balance the modern general counsel must find in working as a business and legal advisor.

Furthermore, we have led the Asia M&A strategy and implementation. A crucial part of Linfox’s strategy is to pursue M&A in the region. We have conducted several due diligence projects and are currently engaged in a multi-country acquisition project.

The legal team has also been driving several redundancy programmes affecting nearly 1000 jobs across Asia.

Did the pandemic lead to a lasting increase in the interaction your legal team has with the strategic plans of the company?

Absolutely. It has been a testing time working with nearly 6000 warehouse workers and truck drivers across Asia, trying to put rules and processes in place to reduce risk. Establishing what the law stated in relation to furlough, redundancy, working with HR to manage employees’ expectations, and more has been an increased part of the role. Different countries experienced different levels of infection and had different risk profiles, not to mention different approaches from the govt to controlling and dealing with the pandemic.

Other shocks have swiftly followed the unusual business environment created by the pandemic. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen, and if so, what does this entail?

Our leadership team set up a Pandemic Committee, which I have chaired for the last two years. It essentially advises each country’s operations team on risk management, setting guidelines for employees, work rules, and quarantine periods. Coming out of Covid, the need for the committee’s interaction with the operations teams has lessened. Regarding preparing for the unforeseen, we have formed a regional risk and compliance committee in the last six months, made up of legal, security, finance and HR, which in turn reports to the CEO and Board’s sub-committee for risk and compliance.