Career Biography

Simona Musso has built her career inside the company she now advises at board level. A law graduate of the University of Turin, she qualified as lawyer and practised commercial law before joining Lavazza in 1996, when the legal department was still forming. She took charge of the function in 2001 and became Group General Counsel and Secretary of the Board in 2014. As Chief Legal, Corporate Affairs & Compliance Officer she reports directly to the Group CEO and sits on the Executive Sounding Board as a C-level executive.

Her tenure maps onto Lavazza’s transformation into a global group present in 140 markets, with record revenues and sharply higher EBITDA. Much of that growth has been inorganic. Musso has led more than 45 M&A transactions in many countries.

Two transactions define the group’s present shape in the last three years: the 2023 acquisition of MaxiCoffee Group brought in France’s leading coffee e-commerce and phygital retail platform and leading OCS operator, and the voluntary tender offer for a stake in IVS Group, Europe’s largest vending operator.

She has been as deliberate about the function as about the deals: a corporate governance reform launched in 2020 carrying the group from a family-owned structure to listed-company standards, extending to the family holding where she is Board Secretary; the globalisation of the legal team through Legal Managers in France, the US, the UK, Germany and Canada; the digitalisation of legal operations and corporate secretarial work; and an Integrated Compliance framework spanning risk, tax, audit, antitrust and data protection. She leads 40 professionals across five countries and serves as Chief Compliance Officer and a member of the Supervisory Body.

Visiting Professor of International Business Law and Food Regulations at ESCP Business School since 2017, she is a member of AIGI, ACC and AISCA. She has featured in the GC Powerlist Italy across successive editions since 2016, and in recent years has appeared consistently in rankings of Italy’s most influential general counsels and among the women shaping the legal profession.