About

The legal and corporate affairs department of Italian multinational energy Group Enel is run by Giulio Fazio, group general counsel as of 2016. The department has more than 500 people across Enel Group’s companies and spans 19 legal units relating to business areas and geographies where Enel is present. Enel Group legal team directly supports the CEO, taking an active part in the decision-making processes towards a more sustainable, efficient, durable and safer business. Fazio illustrates the team’s mission as ‘managing legal issues, litigations and corporate governance, ensuring the compliance of the Group companies’ activities with all applicable laws and regulations’, and underlines the recent reorganisation under the matrix model adopted by the Group. Enel in-house lawyers addressed this challenging reorganisation by approaching new areas of competence, encouraging new views and innovative solutions that can produce value for Enel. Four new legal units (Data Protection Office, Industrial Law and Property Rights, Legal transformation, Legal and Corporate Affairs e-solutions) were created in 2017 to comply with new European regulations and to better reflect the ‘main goals of Enel’s strategic plan’. In-line with the most forward thinking innovations in the sector, Fazio highlights how the role of Enel’s in-house lawyers has ‘deeply changed’ from a traditional model to a ‘new dimension as a strategic lever in decision-making processes’. Integrating and publicising this new role, the legal function organised an initiative, the (IL) Legal Game, to promote teamwork via a competition for realisation of the best scientific research on legal issues relevant for the business and for the Group in general, offering Enel in-house lawyers both a ‘a chance to get to know each other and to gain visibility within the company and beyond the company by the digital publishing of the research topics’. This initiative proved to be a success and enabled management to ‘appreciate the talent present within the legal family and the ability to work with a new approach or on new topics’. Another impressive innovation the team has overseen is the global implementation of the digitalisation program, starting with the adoption of Suite, a unique software for legal activity management to assist in-house legal team and top management in planning and budgeting monitoring and in strategic decision-making, having a significant impact on quality of work. The team deals with international matters, working as staff function at a truly global business: Enel in-house lawyers are present in more than twenty countries in all five continents and are expected to provide innovative solutions in a variety of markets. Among the most relevant business operations and cases for the Group, Fazio mentions the partial non proportional demerger of Enel Green Power SpA in favor of Enel SpA that required a ‘never before carried out solution’. Fazio also cites one of the state’s largest ever arbitration, in which an ICC tribunal rendered an award against the Romanian state in favor of Enel and a corporate restructuring project to separate electricity generation and distribution operations in Chile from those in other South American countries, including several corporate transactions. Deserving special mention in this big team are Francisco de Borja Acha Besga and Giuseppe Conti for each of their contributions to the aforementioned transactions, and Edgar Miller Baird for the legal assistance provided to renewable business development. Coupling this outstanding work with high professional virtues, Fazio explains how ‘commitment, professional knowledge, passion, dedication and teamwork are the keys to legal team’s prodigious achievements’. Combined with innovation and proactivity, these values represent the ‘bedrock’ of Enel Group’s development in a constantly evolving energy sector, which Fazio states, ‘offers legal team new possibilities and opportunities to grow together.’