About

Claudius Sokenu is Avantor’s Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, and Corporate Secretary. He serves on Avantor’s executive leadership team and is responsible for the company’s legal, regulatory, corporate governance, and ethics and compliance matters, globally, and counsels the company and the board of directors on all strategic matters. Prior to joining Avantor, Claudius was general counsel, corporate secretary and chief administrative officer at Unisys, senior vice president and global deputy general counsel at Cognizant, and deputy general counsel, global head of litigation, investigations, and ethics & compliance at Andeavor.

Claudius has more than two decades of executive leadership experience. He is an exceptional C-suite executive with a proven track record of transforming legal, compliance, regulatory, and governance functions at Fortune 500 companies during critical business inflection points. He offers a unique blend of public company C-suite experience across diverse industries, global operational expertise across 30+ countries, and elite credentials from leading global law firms and government. He is recognised for creating significant business value through strategic legal leadership, leading companies through major government and business crisis, and operational transformation.

Before going in-house at Andeavor, Claudius was an equity partner with two Am Law 100 law firms, Shearman & Sterling LLP and Arnold & Porter LLP, and an associate and partner at Mayer Brown, LLP where he was the co-chair of the firm’s securities enforcement practice group. His practice included representing multinational companies and their boards of directors in bet-the-company legal and business risks, including securities enforcement, securities class action defence, government investigations, crisis management, corporate governance, compliance, white-collar crimes, and corporate and commercial litigation.

Prior to his years in private practice, Claudius served in the Honors Program at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement in Washington, DC. He is a fellow with the American College of Governance Counsel.

Claudius earned an LL.M in securities and financial regulation from Georgetown University Law Center, an LL.M in corporate and commercial law from the University of London’s King’s College London and London School of Economics, and an LL.B with Upper Class Honors from London South Bank University. Claudius has been widely recognised for his leadership skills, intellectual

acumen, judgment, and professional accomplishments. Among many others, he has been consistently ranked by Chambers USA and Chambers Global for his investigative, regulatory, and securities enforcement practice, recognised by Securities Law 360 as one of its 10 under 40, named Corporate Lawyer of the Year, 2018 by the National Bar Association, Corporate Law Section, named a Litigation Star by Benchmark Litigation.