About

Jardine Cycle & Carriage (JC&C) is a leading listed company in Singapore with a market capitalisation of approximately US$11.5bn as of November 2017. Headed by group general counsel, director of legal and corporate affairs and company secretary Jeffery Tan, JC&C’s legal department is comprised of four lawyers and eight other professional who support the PR and communications, the Singapore Finance and Corporate Secretariat and the MINDSET (Jardine Matheson Group’s charity in Singapore) divisions within the department. The other lawyers in the team are Lau Jo Yen (senior legal counsel and deputy company secretary), Ong Yee Yen (legal counsel) and Gan Hong Chew (assistant legal counsel). In addition to deepening the department’s collaboration across different business units in the company, JC&C’s team of lawyers were involved in the company’s acquisition of a 10% interest in Vinamilk, Vietnam’s largest company by market capitalisation, for US$1.15bn via a successful auction bidding process and active negotiation. As Tan explains, the JC&C Legal Team ‘played a pivotal role in co-ordinating every stage of this transaction including the various strategies, processes and reporting obligations that arose throughout the entire project, which had the involvement of consultants and third parties such as lawyers, bankers, brokers and stock exchange regulators. Apart from the multi-jurisdictional complexities and considerations, the JC&C Team played an active role in providing pragmatic legal advice and support to all the key stakeholders in a clear and timely manner. The fact that this transaction was conceived and implemented over a period of seven weeks added to the overall level of challenge’. As the legal, compliance and communications advisor to the Jardine Matheson Group charity in Singapore (MINDSET), the team supported the charity in winning the Charity Council of Singapore’s prestigious “Charity Transparency Awards” for two consecutive years.