About

Part of the American Tower Corporation, ATC Colombia provides wireless and broadcast towers among other telecommunication infrastructure that speed network deployment for the wireless and broadcast communications industry. Shortly after the company was set-up in Colombia in 2010, it hired Victor Enrique Cuéllar Olarte as legal and public affairs director, a role he has excelled in over the past eight years and which he describes as ‘a great experience’. After recently crating the legal function for ATC Colombia, Cuéllar was tasked with delivering innovative working methods aimed at creating a department that ‘accompanies every other area, and would be more proactive than reactive’. Today the legal function is involved in all aspects of the domestic business and ‘sees commercial opportunities (from a regulatory perspective) and shares it with the rest of the company so we can evaluate if it could be a new service or product’, according to Cuéllar. He adds that, ‘just changing the way of work and the way of thinking had broadened our service and the company has thanked us [on] this initiative to change’. Recent deals Cuéllar has impressed on include the purchase of around 1,800 towers from Tigo (Colombia Móvil) in 2011, with the creation of a new towerco and the participation from Millicom in this new towerco for approximately US$125m, drafting and assessing in a local financing syndicated loan for US$90m and being involved in the negotiation and purchase (by winning the public bid) of over 1,200 new towers from Tigo (Colombia Móvil) for around US$92m. Prior to working for ATC, Cuéllar was country counsel for IBM in Venezuela, his native country, for almost four years. Despite only moving to Colombia in 2010, he has demonstrated to nominators excellent legal and commercial skills worth highlighting in this year’s research.