About

With a legal team of 46 lawyers in addition to 220 contract managers worldwide, Italian oil and gas industry contractor Saipem is able to rely on the effectiveness and results-driven nature of one of the largest and most comprehensive legal departments serving a business in the Italian oil and gas industry. Mario Colombo leads the team in his role of executive vice president – general counsel, contract management, company affairs and governance, and has an important capacity not only as the most senior lawyer at the company but in terms of business leadership and strategic direction making too. Having such a wide remit was not always the case within the department, Colombo stating that ‘the most important change to the legal team in the last two years was the inclusion of contract management in the area managed by the general counsel, alongside the separation of legal and compliance’, and the flexibility and required to implement these changes and continue to provide excellent legal support is worthy of high praise. A value producing department, the team has played a major part in the company’s capital increase of €3.5bn and a refinancing of €6.7bn in 2016, as well as important international arbitration ‘in many jurisdictions’. The oil sector has experienced a recent downturn, but ‘being more efficient’ is the team’s response to these challenges and Saipem’s senior management and business leaders can have faith that its legal department is at the vanguard of any risk the business faces. Colombo highlights three team members that he states as making ‘outstanding contributions’ to Saipem’s bottom line; Fabio Solimene, who is ‘managing important arbitration cases’, Marco Villa who ‘supports the extraordinary transactions’ and Simone Negri who is cited for ‘advising on governance’.