About

As legal and compliance manager for Corona, a Colombian multinational with 135 years of business history that manufactures and markets products for home and construction, Bernardo Avila occupies a prominent position in Colombia’s in-house market. He joined the firm four years ago and has worked on important transactions, crucial to the companies business strategy. Among these include, the acquisition of Sanitarios Lamosa in Mexico to consolidate the group’s presence in Central and North America, the acquisition of Agromil, a company that produces supplies for the agricultural industry. Avila also played a leading role in the negotiation and agreement for the joint venture between Spanish company Cementos Molins and Corona, for the construction of a cement plant in Colombia, which will ‘allow our group to enter into the cement and concrete market in Colombia consolidating its position in the construction and home improvement industries in Colombia’. Avila is also credited for overhauling the legal function at the company: ‘The legal department at Corona has been restructured with an almost completely new team since my arrival, seeking specialisation of senior and junior lawyers in the most critical and strategic matters for the group, aiming at providing the best service possible to our internal clients by providing high quality legal services to all of them’. Commenting on how the team now operates, he says, ‘we intend to work as a small law firm where the members of our team act as counsellors and trustworthy advisors to our clients, and we only outsource a small number of matters that either require a larger infrastructure like IP matters or where we don’t have a high expertise like litigation or criminal matters’. Before Corona, Avila enjoyed spells as general counsel for two of the large scale coal mining companies, CNR and Prodeco, over the course of approximately four years. He highlights the negotiation and implementation of port access regulations for the largest state-of-the-art coal exporting facilities in Colombia, which implied complex negotiations with the Colombian government, as another career highlight in his in-house career.