About

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) is a major global institutional investor, with the Asia Pacific region receiving around $14bn of their investments to date. Jaimie Cheung, in her role as director and associate general counsel for Asia, heads up a compact but highly skilled team in OTPP’s Hong Kong office. Cheung believes that the region is an ‘environment of ever increasing regulatory and public scrutiny’, which requires her team to ‘act as a gatekeeper to protect against legal, reputational and other risks’. Balancing this ‘against our job in assisting the business in achieving great investment returns’, she says, can lead to ‘having to navigate complex situations’ at times. Cheung has been with the business since it first opened its Hong Kong office, which was the first time the company had an overseas legal team. It also was the first time an entity of the company had been regulated by a financial authority, which meant that Cheung had a significant role to play in the fledgling office’s compliance procedures. ‘I implemented fully tailored guidelines and processes such as training, manuals and a non-disclosure agreement programme’, she explains, ‘and many of these processes have proved to be useful precedents for when we converted our London branch into a subsidiary’. Cheung is keen to maintain an ‘agile and user friendly’ approach within the legal team, in order to ‘deal with the competition for deals’ in the most effective manner possible. In addition, she makes every effort possible to ensure ‘that our internal clients can rely on us for support and problem solving’, to give the legal team the largest possible positive impact.