How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?  

Accelleron was spun-off from its former parent and separately listed at SIX Swiss Exchange in October 2022. Separation, stock listing and build-up of our standalone operations naturally came with a lot of change management and also a lot of accelerated learning. The journey included building up from scratch a global legal and integrity function and designing core processes fit for our business model, while ensuring integrity awareness and performance in a fast-growing organisation with people in 50 countries. Simultaneously, my team delivered a large M&A deal, on handling critical litigation as well as on legal support to operational businesses. Additional challenges included working within management and board on developing group governance and delivering on the first corporate cycle, creating and protecting our new name and brand, and mastering ESG strategy and reporting.  

The single most important ingredient to mastering this array of challenges is the people. I feel extremely lucky that we succeeded in gathering in a short time a culturally diverse team of business-minded and passionate legal and integrity professionals who are willing to support one another and the business. And I am very proud that all are willing to go the extra mile to navigate the uncertainties of a company under that amount of simultaneous change. 

Securing the success of our medium-sized yet multicultural company with a challenging geographical footprint is all about putting key values into action. Legal and integrity needs to be genuinely curious to understand business drivers and priorities, to entrepreneurially tell theoretical from real risk, and to get all hands-on deck to move further with conscious courage. This will result in gaining and maintaining mutual trust without which success is not sustainable.    

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?  

Sustainability is a part of Accelleron’s purpose. We developed our sustainability strategy as part of our business strategy and have been working on ambitious targets under seven UN SDG up to 2030. To ensure all are aligned with the strategy, all short-term incentive contain a sustainability-linked target, and the executive long-term incentive will include specific CO2 reduction targets. We progressed on our commitment to uphold the 10 principles of the UN Global Compact, and we trained our people on the Code of Conduct, covering topics like anti-corruption, human rights and business ethics reporting. Accelleron has a leading role in the field of operational efficiency and is at the forefront of working on alternative fuels. Already with today’s fuels, we enable engine operators to reduce their CO2 emissions. Alternative fuels are supported by the UN International Maritime Organisation, who now targets zero carbon emissions from international shipping by 2050. We strive to reduce our environmental impact in energy, water and waste, and identified changing from air to sea freight and increasing the share of recycled materials as main decarbonisation opportunities. We are committed to the SBTi and will develop respective emissions targets. 

Sustainability is a journey with multiple drivers, namely regulation, customer and financial market expectations, which are complex and continuously evolving. The legal and integrity function has traditionally been at the heart of companies’ anti-corruption efforts, business ethics culture as well as investigation, resolution and remediation of unethical behavior. The general counsel is now a key function in keeping track on other essential sustainability developments, such as supply chain diligence requirements and convergence of reporting regulations across jurisdictions. Also, the general counsel is uniquely placed to work with fellow governance functions on designing core new ESG-related assurance processes. Spotting and mitigating the risk of greenwashing is another important new core competency of the general counsel.