About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

Melania Calzada and myself are responsible for dealing with all legal and compliance matters in Central American and Caribbean markets.

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has been involved with in the last years?

Divestment of our local chocolate business in Costa Rica called El Gallito, shutdown of our plants in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, creation of a 300 employee shared service hub in Costa Rica for HR, finance and IT services of North America and Latin America and obtaining OFAC permits to operate in Cuba.

What geographical area does the team cover and what challenges has it faced when covering multiple jurisdictions in the region?

We cover all Central American and Caribbean islands. The greatest challenges are dealing with parralel imports in Costa Rica, political/economic turmoil in Nicaragua, Puerto Rico challenging US regulation and complying with the US Department of Treasury sanctions/restrictions on Cuba and Nicaragua.

What ‘legal tech’ products does the team utilise? What is useful about the products and could they be improved?

We use an email/document repository and sharing platform for the function to turn paperless and share key documents with stakeholders.

How does the team contribute constructively to the growth and expansion of the company?

We are part of the leadership leam so we are completely in sync with ongoing sales and marketing projects and thus we are business partner which enable growth for the company.

Focus on… reinventing legal counselling

Due to dramatical changes in our Mondelēz organisation, our Central American legal team has had to reinvent itself and learn new ways of working and areas of law. We shut down our manufacturing plants in Nicaragua and Costa Rica while successfully transferring production to other sites and respectfully and legally treating employees and contractors affected by the decision. We sold a very important local chocolate company in Costa Rica called El Gallito. Our route to market was completely transformed by focusing on key markets and giving non-core market to Master Distributor, which represented 30MM Dollars in overheads savings but which required our legal team to terminate 40 existing distribution agreements and signed 15 new agreements in markets where local distributors have strong legal protection. We helped set up a Shared Service Hub in Costa Rica which provides HR, IT and finance services to North America and Latin America. We have dealt and complied with new and strict sanctions from the US Government on Cuba and Nicaragua which has severely restricted the way our sales teams carry out business in these countries. Finally, we carried out a project to centralize all our external counseling services into a single law firm providing scale and significant savings to our legal department.