How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure organisational resilience?

Due to rapid changes in geopolitics, the economic landscape and the business operating environment, it is inevitable that we have to deal with unforeseen crises and instability on a regular basis. As the Group GC, it is of paramount importance to play a leadership role in building and maintaining a robust compliance programme and risk management strategies. They form the guiding stars for the management and the Company to navigate through crises and periods of instability with the aim to reduce disruption caused to business, recover quickly from the turmoil and gain resilience to cope with future challenges. My legal team and I play a vital role in identifying potential crises and risks, providing advice and support to the management. During crisis management, it is crucial to have effective and transparent communication with all stakeholders to come up with the crisis management plan and swift implementation.

In the face of increasing regulation and scrutiny, what are the biggest compliance challenges keeping GCs up at night?

I see the rapid and ever-changing geopolitical landscape creates the biggest compliance challenges, as new laws, regulations and orders could come into place overnight which may affect the way we do business internationally. We always need to keep abreast of the legal landscape to make sure we are doing business in a compliant way. This is not easy, and we always find ourselves in grey areas and critical circumstances.