About

‘A young lawyer, very intelligent and who always has vision’, Renato Maia Lopes joined Votorantim Metais as legal manager back in 1999. In 2008 he was promoted to general legal manager at Votorantim Steel before returning to the group’s metals unit as general counsel in 2011, where he heads teams in Brazil, Peru and the United States. By his own admission, he touched on everything from tax to trade marks to criminal law in his early career, but he made a notable impact in 2004 when he originated an electronic case management control system that is ‘the pride of the department’. His more recent appointments have seen him with greater involvement in strategic matters, particularly transactional and contractual work. Insiders note that ‘he has restructured his team to great effect’ and that ‘he himself is deeply efficient and organised’, thereby ‘facilitating transactions and also staying on the right side in terms of compliance matters and all those issues that can be lost from sight when a company is growing strongly’. Also a member of the company’s conduct committee, one commentator notes ‘he has grown within the organization, which also reflects well on them’.