Countries in LatAm your company operates in/ your role covers: Brasil, Perú, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, México, Panamá.

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

The in-house legal team provides wide ranging and comprehensive services to the company. As a result, the team can deliver a highly qualified assessment of all the stages of projects. Consequently, our team has been involved in many significant cases and transactions, including the award of a contract to construct and operate Line 6 of the São Paulo subway in Brazil, which is currently the largest infrastructure project under execution in LATAM. The project will create over 9,000 jobs and it shall reduce the route that currently takes approximately 1.5 hours on a bus to 23 minutes on a subway.

We have also been involved in the amicable confidential settlement with high-ranked companies to close one of the biggest litigation proceedings of Acciona. The result of such settlement was highly satisfactory to the company. Also, the closure of multiple amendments of a contract in Ecuador, broadening scope of work for the benefit of our client. We’ve worked on various arbitral awards related to a project in Peru where nearly all of our claims for millions of euros where granted and also substantive claims against the termination of a contract in Mexico for reasons declared as not attributable to the contractor.

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by the Ukraine crisis, attendant supply chain costs rising and inflation. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen and, if so, what does this entail?  

Indeed, the events that have taken place during the last years and its worldwide effects have made even more necessary than before to be prepared for the unexpected. Our in-house legal team has always tried to put the means to be prepared for the unforeseen, but it is true that in the last years we have focused additional efforts in preventing the consequences of any unexpected event, no matter how remote or unlikely it may seem to be.

Such additional efforts have been displayed both in the tendering and in the execution phase.

In the tendering stage, the legal team always fights for the inclusion of clauses such as force majeure or change in law in the relevant contracts or Memorandums of Understanding to be signed with other relevant parties of the project, assuring that the scope of such clauses is broad enough to cover any unexpected event that may arise in the future and is also able to mitigate the consequences of such event in the project. Specific clauses referring to Covid-19 and addressing its possible effects have been inserted in most of our latest contracts awarded. The team always tries to avoid and strongly advises against the signature of any long-term contract without the inclusion of a price-indexation clause.

During the execution of the contract, the legal team works closely with the contract management team in order to increase business people’s awareness with regards to: (i) good practices that could be useful in the future in unexpected situations, and (ii) legal and contractual remedies that could mitigate the consequences of such circumstances.

In both phases the legal team does a great effort in searching for any relevant provision under the applicable law that may be useful to defend our rights under any unexpected event. Such research also extends to relevant case law or doctrine that can be useful in any unforeseen scenario.

What are your organisations plans in the LATAM region over the next 12 months and how will your legal expertise help to achieve these plans?

We intend to focus on the following areas: specialisation of the different departments of the legal team to meet the business’ needs, who has increasingly specific and complex legal queries and problems. We want to benefit from the in-depth knowledge in certain matters that were not so common before, but now are appearing with greater recurrence and require our utmost attention.

We intend to focus the external assistance received by the team in a limited number of firms and individuals of our full confidence, based on previous successful experiences. We aim to achieve a restricted panel of well-chosen external counsel to take advantage of the resulting synergies and obtain other benefits, such as better fee-agreements.

We will exploit the full the know-how achieved in LATAM, to enhance the assistance provided to the business in its decision-making process. In this regard, the previous experiences with relevant clients or subcontractors and the proceedings that have taken place before certain chambers and under certain rules have proven to be extremely useful for our assessment and we intend to continue to exploit this knowledge in the future and improve the synergies obtained by that know-how.