About

Nobina is the Nordic region’s largest and most experienced public transport provider and largest bus company. Martin Pagrotsky joined Nobina in 2006 as general counsel, and added head of compliance and company secretary aspects to his role following the company’s listing on the Nasdaq OMX in 2015. When he first started at Nobina he was the first company lawyer, as the business was totally dependent on legal firms and used an entirely reactive form of handling legal matters. He says that his work has been to ‘implement work process and strategies to get the company to act proactively and to use the legal resources in an effective way. This has freed up almost half the budget to be used [for] special cases to push the boundaries within a market evolving from state subsidisation and state owned competitors.’ Pagrotsky designed and set up the legal department and is responsible for the use of external legal resources also. Pagrotsky says that he is ‘one of the most senior voices in the current group management team [having] been a member for five years. In a company that is almost totally contract based the legal department has an influencing voice in almost everything that is happening in the company, which gives a huge opportunity to affect a positive outcome’. During his tenure the group management team has taken the company from an annual loss making of SEK800m to a profit of SEK400m and from a debt of €200m to be completely debt free today. Since the company’s business is contract based, successful legal risk management is essential. ‘The biggest achievement as a legal department has been to introduce a more strict way of contract management with principles and strategies to minimise risk and to strengthen the opportunities in a company that has an annual revenue of SEK7.5bn, mainly deriving from tendered contracts with community owned PTA’s’. Further demonstrating his proficiency in this area, Pagrotsky is currently secretary of a working group consisting of the market leaders both and competitors, to update and improve the recommendations for terms and conditions in the market.