About

With operations in Southern Africa, India, Poland and a number of European countries and a JSE Top 40 listing, as well as a highly diversified healthcare portfolio for its private clients, Life Healthcare’s operations provide a consistently high workload for its in-house legal team to tackle. Mark Stafford, head of legal and insurance for Life Healthcare, leads the team and has built up a stellar reputation as a top-notch in-house counsel in the nine years he has practiced with the company. His tenure has seen the team reach an extremely high level of performance as well, with Stafford summing up the team culture that has encouraged this: ‘The team enjoys a strong culture of collaboration, sharing of knowledge and legal debate has development amongst the team. This culture forms part of the glue which binds the team together and results in brain storming sessions which facilitate innovative legal solutions that are designed to facilitate achievement by the Group of its strategic goals’. Stafford has a number of projects to choose from when discussing his six-person function’s main successes in the past two years, opting for a varied overview of both external and internal achievements. ‘The acquisition of Alliance Medical Group in November 2016 was based on an enterprise value of approximately £800m’, he explains, ‘and involved launching a rights offer worth ZAR9bn in order to raise the funds necessary to repay the bridge funding that was put in place for the acquisition. We also oversaw the outsourcing of the entire Group’s IT infrastructure –including a highly complex and specialist series of agreements which resulted in the introduction of some pioneering changes to the IT environment – and the strategic disposal of the Group’s investment in Max Healthcare Institute (an Indian based private hospital group) for an amount of approximately ZAR4.5bn’.