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China and Hong Kong 2017

Gill Meller

Legal and European business director | MTR, Hong Kong

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China and Hong Kong 2017

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Gill Meller

Legal and European business director | MTR, Hong Kong

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As legal and European business director of MTR, Gill Meller bears ultimate responsibility for one of the most diverse and complex in-house legal portfolios in Hong Kong. On top of its core business of building and operating Hong Kong’s metro system, MTR is also a significant real estate player, based on its practice of developing the areas around stations and depots. This has been highly successful, and MTR is now the second largest landowner in Hong Kong after the Government. Given its complex operations, MTR requires an excellent legal director and, as one of the most widely-respected legal counsel in Hong Kong, Meller fulfils this criteria. Meller first got a taste of the railway industry while providing advice to Metronet Rail as part of the London Underground public-private partnership project and found that she didn’t want to go back to private practice, such was her enjoyment of the role. Eventually deciding that in-house work was ‘a lot more fun’ and well suited to her talents, Meller moved to Hong Kong and to MTR in 2004, quickly proving herself to be an asset to ‘supporting their growth businesses, which included flying out to the UK, Sweden and Australia’. After impressing throughout her tenure, Meller ‘gradually took on a larger role in the legal team’ and, in 2011, was appointed legal director. Meller’s role has expanded further from here and, as well as ‘looking after corporate governance, risk and insurance’ for The MTR Group, she was recently placed in charge of the entire European arm of MTR’s operations. This non-legal role is further evidence of her considerable business acumen and commercially-minded approach. Meller has shaped the MTR legal team around her own philosophy of what makes an excellent corporate counsel: ‘I can’t bear the thought of a legal team that doesn’t understand the business, doesn’t know why they are doing a particular transaction and can’t give focused advice’, she comments. She has encouraged her team ‘to be proactive and a real part of the business’ first and foremost. Meller cites increasing regulatory pressures and ever increasing public expectations of businesses as challenges for the team. ‘Compliance used to be just for banks to worry about, but now all big corporates have to deal with it’, she explains. The role of the in-house legal team often being to advise on ‘the right thing to do’, as much as just being legally acceptable.

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