About

Since September 2017, Manuela Villa Gonzalez has been the legal manager and compliance officer of Philips Lighting for the Northern Latin American region encompassing Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Central America and the Caribbean. She is responsible for the management of all commercial, contractual, labour, consumer and other legal matters. As compliance officer, she manages training on anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-trust, control and prevention of money laundering and terrorism financing and implementing new regulations and conducting ethical investigations on compliance related issues. She began her career in private practice, at law firms such as Gómez Pinzón Abogados, but always wished to move in-house. She said that, ‘Since I can remember, I always wanted to use my experience as external counsel in an in-house position, considering the private sector to represent very interesting and diverse challenges, and also wanting to learn more about the core business of the different industries that I had advised’. She developed her talent in multi-regional regulation and negotiation skills while in her first in-house position as manager of aviation affairs at Avianca. While there she negotiated the contracts for lighting the operational spaces for Avianca in Terminal 1 of El Dorado International Airport in Bogota, a major victory for the firm. Villa then moved to Dell-EMC as Northern Latin American legal counsel and compliance officer, developing her first multi-jurisdictional focus. She was responsible for implementing and expanding Dell’s compliance policy and supervising the merger between Dell and EMC in the region, excelling at the challenge of adapting corporate cultures and implementing a business-minded legal strategy. She has carried this business focus to her role at Philips Lighting negotiating projects with, as she says, ‘adverse conditions’ towards Phillips successfully altering clauses such as the imposition of sanctions, penalty clauses, extension of agreements and others, greatly increasing the financial and reputational impact of the company. She has also implemented “contract approval tool” technology, which reduces the exposure of the company and saves time. Her talent and experience has been crucial to Philips Lighting’s transition to the “Signify era”, managing the implementation of this company name change projected for 2019.