About

Sandra Gebara Boni began her career working almost exclusively for Group Saint Gobain covering all legal areas. After 11 years, she moved to Grupo Pão de Açúcar (now Groupe Casino) as a legal manager and nine years later became a legal director reporting to the CFO. In 2014 Boni received a proposal from Group Carrefour in Brazil to assume the legal department of the Group and the legalisation department (licenses and permits), reporting to the CEO in Brazil and the general counsel in France. At the end of 2017 she received a proposal from Mexican company Grupo Lala to develop the legal department, compliance and corporate affairs in Brazil, which was a great opportunity to develop new skills. Since then, Boni has implemented new procedures, teams, and positions in the legal department, such as a controller in the legal department, to deal with the administrative issues of the various areas of the department – payments, implementation of software to manage the lawsuits, workflow communications with the financial department, better control of the provisions, guarantees and the budget of the legal department. She started monthly meetings with the team, to discuss how the legal department can help the company to achieve results, and instigated monthly meetings with people in charge of operations to discuss new business opportunities. Boni says, ‘since we were close to the operations departments and different areas in the company, these new procedures were well-received by everyone that understood they could have agility; alternatives do develop business and a new partner in the company’.