About

Having served for nearly seven years as the head legal counsel and corporate compliance officer for Bayer, a global enterprise with core competencies in the field of healthcare, agriculture and high-tech polymer materials, Bengü Halavut Yıldırım has achieved many changes in the workings of the legal department. She established the legal and compliance department of the local branch in 2008. Among the changes she introduced to optimise the workings of the legal department, she organised the legal communications and documentation and established a very powerful external team with clear and accountable reporting. ‘I improved the partnership between legal and the business and now we sit on the company’s Turkey council, which works like the board of managers’. Halavut Yıldırım is the first legal compliance officer in the company, overseeing compliance cases and ensuring the company complies with regulatory requirements. ‘Trying to create a compliance culture in a company where employees had never worked with an internal legal counsel and had no legal training was the biggest challenge and achievement in my in-house career’ she says.