About

Due to a full immersion into the business, Timo Spitzer’s legal team (Santander legal corporate and investment banking Germany, Austria and Switzerland) at Banco Santander in Frankfurt quickly established itself as a pragmatic and commercially-minded solution provider, becoming one of the primary drivers of the bank’s success story in the region. A highlight of the year was clearly Spitzer’s award-winning lecture on international sanction provisions at Harvard Law School during the XVI Congress Harvard-Complutense on “New Finance, Restructuring and Corporate Law Challenges: A Transatlantic Perspective” in September. With assistance from his legal team, Spitzer subsequently addressed Santander’s worldwide heads of legal and corporate centre legal colleagues during the “Global Legal Days” at the bank’s global headquarters in Spain.

To balance these activities with the ever-increasing demands of a fast-paced and rapidly growing business, the contributions provided by Spitzer’s team at Banco Santander form cornerstones of the legal function. Since moving to Santander in 2015, Spitzer has employed lawyers from Brazil, Bulgaria, China, France, Italy, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain and Ukraine. As to the individual lawyers currently working in Frankfurt, Spitzer mentions first and foremost Cristina Repáraz Grávalos, a Spanish-qualified lawyer having previously worked for three and a half years at EY Legal in Madrid, now helping him with his transactional work to support Santander’s multinational clients headquartered in the DACH region with respect to their global corporate and investment banking portfolio, particularly syndicated and bilateral financings, export and trade finance as well as cash and liquidity management. In addition, Repáraz Grávalos assists him with his postgraduate course on international trade and export finance as an adjunct professor at the Institute for Law and Finance (ILF) at Goethe University Frankfurt. Ekaterina Eshieva supported Spitzer with, inter alia, the preparation of a speech on “Forward Thinking Legal Departments” and several international presentations. Finally, Rocío Sancho Nuño looks at anti-money laundering and compliance issues where she deals with the enforcement of sanction policies, KYC and AML rules among other matters. Prior to that she assisted Spitzer with respect to GTB and credit transactions, starting at the bank in September 2017.

Sancho Nuño gained previous experience working as a corporate lawyer for Mutua Madrileña, an insurance company in Madrid, and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Mannheim. Other lawyers working in Spitzer’s department in 2018 were Iryna Karpliuk (Ukraine) and Enrico Gissi (Italy) who joined on short-term contracts and are currently pursuing opportunities with reputable US law firms. Given his impeccable reputation, Spitzer himself is extremely well regarded in the international in-house community, being a prominent feature of distinguished roundtables and lectures, and is also a GC Powerlist: Germany 2017-decorated lawyer.