Regional General Counsel South Asia | GE Aerospace
Vani Mehta
Regional General Counsel South Asia | GE Aerospace
Team size: 3
What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?
Vani leads the GE Aerospace South Asia legal team in the region supporting commercial engines services, defence systems, supply chain at Pune MMF plant and engineering centre at JFWTC in Bangalore ensuring enterprise-wide consistency to GE’s legal strategy and approach. She is the advisor to the GE senior leadership in the region and drives GE’s thought leadership in the legal fraternity. With ever dynamic geo-political landscape including tariffs, evolving regulatory and legal aviation framework in region advising company on both growth opportunities and risk mitigation strategies.
How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?
The role of a General Counsel involves being natural crusaders., being the voice of reason and always having eye to detail towards service and collaboration with business teams. The daily balancing act of walking multiple tight ropes fearlessly representing business viewpoint but within the confines of legal and ethical rules. It’s a difficult set of acrobatics but something by and large most General Counsel’s do it everyday.
Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?
One of the interesting experiences has been the opportunity to regionally lead one of the biggest separation projects in history of corporate world for General Electric, successfully leading cross border functional teams in creation of independent companies GE Healthcare, GE Vernova and GE Aerospace in South Asia. This separation was driven by a need for more focused operations and tailored strategies for each distinct business sector. Leading the legal teams over a course of two years working through complex GE corporate structures and executing business vision of the split allowing each company to have a deeper operational focus, more tailored capital allocation, and greater agility to meet customer needs in its specific industry with investor clarity.
How can general counsel foster a corporate culture that supports ESG principles and compliance across all levels of the organisation?
The role of general counsel’s and overall legal department hold importance in building a compliance culture of ESG within the organisation. ESG has been the buzzword for corporate world for a while now with the CSR reporting norms changing and SEBI coming up with so many disclosure requirements and role of in-house teams holds the key to successful and effective implementation and reporting. The reporting guidelines is a very evolving subject when we talk about ESG, environment sustainability and governance, three very independent factors of ESG. The legal teams need to understand that no one size fits all approach for ESG is essential, industry specific customisations are the way forward. These reporting must also be able to demonstrate company’s responsibility towards sustainability along with shareholders and investors ESG goals rather than just a tick in box.
Executive general counsel, Latin America
GE Aerospace
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Executive general counsel, Latin America
GE Aerospace
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