About

Founded in 2001 and based in Kuala Lumpur, Tesco Malaysia owns and operates hypermarkets in the country, offering fresh produce, groceries, household items and apparel and its own food and non-food products. Its legal team is led by corporate services director Azliza Azmel, an established in-house counsel considered a “go-to” person by the business and a member of the senior leadership team and board of directors of Tesco Malaysia. In her years of service, she has created a strong portfolio within the legal and regulatory department, championing governance and compliance and led a high performing legal team. With regards to advocacy work in the industry, Azmel has lobbied and engaged with the Ministry of Domestic Trade (MDTCC) to further influence the liberalisation of the Distributive Trade Guidelines for Foreign Participation in the Malaysian retail sector and also supported the development of local SMEs in the supplier base by organising special programs and awards with the MDTCC and the Ministry of Agriculture. Under her management, the team has led the work on the issuance of RM3.5bn for the Islamic conventional commercial papers medium term notes programme, a first Islamic bonds issuance by a western retailer and the acquisition and integration of Makro stores in 2007. The team has been central to leading the strategic and planning function to support the development, engagement and mobilisation of Tesco Malaysia’s business plan, ensuring the appropriate level of control and communications from a programmer office perspective. Most notably, Azmel has led the team to implement the anti-bribery and fraud compliance programme as per the UK Bribery Act requirements, which applies to all subsidiaries of Tesco Group, by embedding compliance and ethical culture checks. The project involved collaborating with the Tesco Group in the UK to deploy online due diligence for all contractors, suppliers and business partners. The team has also directed Tesco’s CSR programmes, which include Food Surplus Donation, wherein all unsold edible bakery and produce items from stores are donated to local charities through foodbank partners. Another social initiative supported by the legal team is the School Adoption, partnered with Pintar Foundation to enrich the lives of school children through good health education and supporting the Robin Food app, used to facilitate the collection of food from Tesco stores to the foodbank partners, which, to date, has redistributed more than 125,000 kilograms of food – equivalent to 500,000 meals – from 28 stores nationwide to charity homes and for the urban poor.