Team size: 10

What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past 12 months?

Over the past year, together with my legal team I have had the privilege of supporting Attica Group’s evolving strategy through a series of complex and high-impact projects across the maritime, hospitality and digital sectors. These initiatives required legal leadership at both operational and strategic levels, often involving multiple jurisdictions and business units.

A key undertaking has been the legal and operational integration of ANEK Lines into the Group. This involved navigating a multi-layered merger process with complex corporate, regulatory and competition law elements. The effort culminated in the successful integration of operations, workforce and governance structures, designed to optimise performance, achieve synergies and reinforce market position.

The legal team supported a number of strategic fleet-related transactions and asset optimisation over the past year. These included the acquisition of new tonnage, the exercise of purchase options under long-term charter agreements, the sale of older assets and the conclusion of several charter-party arrangements to ensure operational continuity. These actions formed part of a broader asset optimisation and capital efficiency strategy. In parallel, we handled the disposal of non-core assets, such as real estate holdings, helping to streamline the Group’s structure.

A major project was the Group’s strategic exit from its Morocco operation, a transaction involving the transfer of a corporate stake and associated vessel assets. This marked the conclusion of a successful international venture that I had helped establish from inception, which went on to secure a leading market position within a relatively short period. The transaction reflected both the commercial success of the project and its alignment with the Group’s evolving priorities.

The Group continued to expand its presence in the hospitality sector and tourism synergies through the acquisition of an additional hotel on the island of Naxos. This investment built on previous activity in the sector and forms part of a wider strategic plan to diversify operations and create synergies between transport and tourism. Legal work included M&A structuring, real estate due diligence and licensing integration.

As part of the Group’s broader digital transformation programme, legal efforts focused on GDPR harmonisation and digital transformation, ensuring GDPR and consumer protection compliance across platforms. The project aims to create a unified customer experience across brands and services, supported by secure and interoperable data infrastructure.

Across these initiatives, the focus has been on ensuring legal soundness, strategic consistency and timely execution, contributing to the Group’s transformation and resilience in a fast-moving operating environment.

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?

Periods of instability require calm, clarity and consistency. My first priority is to ensure that the legal team remains a source of stability and reliable guidance, focused on identifying risks early, simplifying complexity and enabling swift, informed decisions.

At Attica Group, this has meant aligning legal strategy tightly with business priorities; whether in supporting the integration of new structures and businesses, managing start-ups or divestments, or navigating regulatory and operational uncertainties. In each case, the legal approach has been anchored in the broader objective: organisational resilience through efficiency, simplification and long-term value creation.

We aim to stay ahead of potential disruptions by maintaining strong internal alignment, understanding the business model deeply and ensuring that legal is not just reactive but an active contributor to strategic planning.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

The role of in-house counsel today goes far beyond technical legal knowledge. Three attributes stand out to me, including strategic thinking: understanding the business model, anticipating change, and aligning legal guidance with long-term value; sound judgment: the ability to balance risk with opportunity, knowing when to hold the line and when to enable flexibility; and trustworthiness: legal teams are often the conscience of an organisation. Being a trusted advisor, i.e. discreet, reliable, grounded, is essential for credibility and influence.

In-house counsel must be both legally rigorous and commercially fluent, with the confidence to speak up and the humility to listen.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws ?

Digital transformation must start with clarity, on business goals, the legal risk landscape and the systems that connect them.

In the context of Attica Group’s recent wide-scale digital unification initiative, our legal strategy focused on embedding compliance from the design phase. We worked closely with IT, operations and marketing to ensure GDPR and consumer protection compliance across all platforms, enabling a seamless customer experience that is also legally sound.

We mapped data flows, reviewed cross-platform processing and implemented frameworks for ongoing monitoring. Importantly, we built legal awareness into the transformation process itself, making legal a partner rather than a checkpoint.