About

‘Senior managers have told me I need to keep a diary’, says Samuel Libnic, Citigroup’s general counsel for Latin America and Mexico. ‘With all the experiences I’ve had at Citi, I will be able to write a thriller one day’. Libnic joined Citibank Mexico in 1996 as its general counsel for global corporate and investment banking. In 2001 – just as the Argentine financial crisis, which cost Citi almost $2bn, was beginning to bite – he became deputy general counsel for Latin America, a position he held until being appointed overall general counsel for Latin America in 2007. ‘Latin America is the region where you will find the biggest number of financial crises in the world’, says Libnic. ‘Every two or three years we have a crisis, and if it’s not a financial crisis there will be an economic, political or social crisis. But I have lived through so many of these crises now that I have almost become the fireman. When we have a significant crisis in the bank, people come to me’. Utilising his knowledge of the company and the region, Libnic has continued to acquire positions of increasing responsibility: he joined Citigroup’s legal management committee (2010), became vice president of the Citibank N.A. board of directors (2012), was appointed a member of the board of directors of Banco de Chile and, since 2013, has been the direct report for the legal department of Citigroup’s Mexican banking subsidiary, Banamex. Managing this huge range of responsibilities would, he says, be impossible without the support of his team and the wider business. ‘They are the ones on the front line trying to protect the shareholders. They are the ones who understand the region and its ups and downs. But to have such a team you need stability, and I am fortunate that Citi has a very low rate of attrition. Most of the team has been with us more than 10 years. They live and breathe Citi. That is because business opens the door to us, invites us to meetings and gets us involved at the inception stage of any regional strategy’. This close involvement between legal and business has also benefited Citi’s board and shareholders. ‘External counsel may give you an opinion that a certain thing is legal, enforceable and valid, but there is a huge difference between something legal and something you want to be involved in as a business. A lot of banks have paid billions of dollars in fines, often not because they did something illegal, but because they did something that was legal and stupid. Most of the time I am consiglieri or counsellor to senior management, and my judgement and strategy are more important than my legal opinions. As internal counsel, we are the ones who bring that balance internally and make sure the organisation doesn’t do something stupid’. A number of businesses have been punished for taking shortcuts in Latin America, particularly in jurisdictions where the law is not well written, where regulators are relatively unsophisticated or where regulatory enforcement is weak. As such, the controls exercised by Libnic and his team have been hugely important. A further significant risk, says Libnic, comes when those working outside the region fail to appreciate its dynamics: ‘You don’t want to look like the guy who is always saying “no”. But at the end of the day our client is the shareholder, not the banker. We need to protect shareholders against risks’. In 2016, Citi began cutting most of its retail-banking and credit-card operations across Latin America, with its Brazil, Argentina and Colombia-based units moved into a holding company in preparation for a sale. At the beginning of that year, Libnic had around 420 lawyers in his team. By end of the year his team had fallen to around 370. It will decrease further to around 350 lawyers this year. However, the bank remains committed to the region – and for good reason. In 2016, Latin America and Mexico produced $10bn for Citi, representing 14% of its global revenues. The 26 countries across the region in which Citi has a presence have become hugely important to the bank, and they are becoming more important each year as the region’s contribution to global revenues edges upwards. For the bank’s lawyers, says Libnic, the region remains a great place to work. ‘The most incredible part of our job is the range of issues we cover. In the morning we can be dealing with a criminal investigation, two hours later we can be dealing with a huge financing or IPO, and by lunch we might be dealing with a political crisis that has erupted somewhere. Not only is each matter complete different, it is more often than not hugely important to the jurisdiction in which it happens. Citi is a big player with a very important presence in Latin America and what we do has big consequences for the economic and political situation there. It is a great privilege and a huge responsibility to work in such a company’. Before joining Citi, Libnic worked at Shearman & Sterling in New York and at leading Mexican firm Basham, Ringe and Correa. He is licensed to practice law in Mexico and New York.