What are the most significant cases, projects, or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

The defining project of the past year was a comprehensive refinancing and renegotiation of the Group’s banking indebtedness. It went well beyond a simple repricing exercise: we recalibrated the entire covenant architecture, restructured facility terms across our pool of lending banks, and realigned the capital structure to give the organisation genuine strategic optionality for its next phase of growth. It required coordinating legal, finance and multiple banking counterparties in parallel, translating what could have been a purely defensive exercise into a platform for future expansion.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

I see banking relationships as a form of strategic risk architecture, not just a financing function – concentrating dependency on a single lender means concentrating vulnerability, so diversification is a deliberate choice to preserve the organisation’s room to manoeuvre. This is precisely why the covenant restructuring I led was designed the way it was: not to fix a single problem, but to give us structural flexibility that we can draw on regardless of what the next disruption turns out to be. On governance, I keep decision-making processes clear and well-documented – board cadence, reporting lines, who signs off on what – so that when pressure does arise, the organisation can move quickly. Equally important is transparent, frequent communication with investors and lenders, well before problems surface, not after: a lender who has been kept informed through good times is far more likely to stay constructive through difficult ones. Ultimately, resilience is as much about the trust you’ve already built as it is about the paperwork you can produce when asked for it.

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

The in-house counsel role has shifted from gatekeeper to strategic partner – today’s counsel are expected to sit at the table on board and investor matters, not just review them afterwards, which mirrors my own move from Head of Legal into a Chief Corporate Officer role. Commercial curiosity is the defining attribute: understanding the business well enough to shape decisions on M&A, financing and expansion. Adaptability matters too – each career step meant learning a genuinely new discipline. Finally, building trust quickly with very different stakeholders – investors, banks, franchisees, regulators – across multiple countries is what turns legal expertise into real influence.

What does being strategic mean to you?

Being strategic increasingly means bringing technology, risk and regulatory judgement into the same conversation as business growth, rather than treating them as separate lanes – a broader remit reshaping the general counsel role industry-wide. For me, it means connecting legal decisions to business outcomes: moving from a strictly legal role into Chief Commercial Officer taught me that the most valuable legal advice anticipates where the business needs to go, rather than simply reacting to what’s already been decided.