About

After two and a half years as a corporate lawyer, Pieter-Jan Vandevelde felt ready for a new challenge in business law, transferring to an in-house role in a big international group which according to him implied, ‘a more practical approach in a true business environment with an international orientation’. Vandevelde went on to start at Bekaert as a relationship lawyer for the biggest business comprising of commercial contract drafting and negotiations, share and assets acquisitions, mergers, company reorganisations and legal risk management. After three years in this role he was promoted to the role of regional counsel Latin-America and became responsible for all legal and M&A related activities in the Latin American region, a strategically important region for Bekaert. Over those years he became increasingly involved in all M&A related activities in the Bekaert Group, and as a consequence was promoted to his current role and became responsible for managing the Bekaert group M&A activities globally, such as strategic mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and corporate restructurings. He has been involved in Bekaert’s acquisition of the Pirelli Steel Cord Division which was the biggest acquisition in the history of Bekaert, as well as the merger of the global ropes and advanced cords business of Bekaert and Bridon, including the refinancing of this joint venture in 2016. Vandevelde combines this role with his role as group legal counsel for the treasury related activities of the Bekaert Group, for example legal support and coordination of all refinancing related projects. During his time at the company, he has been the project lead for the implementation of a new E2E M&A process within Bekaert. With Bekaert’s desire to grow non-organically, Vandevelde was requested last year to review the M&A process and came up with a new fully integrated E2E (strategy – transaction – integration) M&A process which is applicable for all M&A transactions globally. ‘This exercise also enabled me to develop a completely new governance process for the review of our M&A projects, which allows for different opportunities to review key-issues along the way’, says Vandevelde.