About

The five-person team managing the Colombian legal affairs of Parque Arauco, a large Latin American shopping mall company, has had a fundamental impact on the corporate strategy of the business in recent years. As Parque Arauco, headquartered in Chile, has experienced impressive growth in the Colombian market, the team has managed to instil a culture of compliance with moral and ethical principles as a fundamental factor in making business decisions. ‘With that in mind, in almost all the developments of our business we have an integral lawyer that is looking for the procedures and negotiations in order to avoid risks and problems but, at the same time, looking to be as efficient as possible’, says Tatiana Montealegre, manager of the legal team in Colombia. The most important innovation introduced by the team recently has been the efforts to structure the implementation of concession agreements for the development of real estate assets of the company. ‘It is important to highlight that in Colombia the concession agreement is an atypical contract, which means that it is not fully regulated in the law’, says Montelalegre. ‘With the implementation of the concession we were not only able to develop our goals as a company in Colombia, but also help real estate developers and merchants’. The team has also been involved in the development of some of the most significant shopping centre real estate projects in Colombia, including Parque La Colina Centro Commercial in the city of Bogotá.