Given Spain’s integration within the EU and its exposure to Latin America and North Africa, have recent geopolitical tensions and trade shifts changed your company’s risk profile over the past year?

Abertis operates a global portfolio of toll road concessions across more than 10 countries, which means that geopolitical dynamics are not an abstract concern for our legal team, they are an immediate operational reality. Over the past year, we have seen a meaningful shift in the risk landscape across several of our key markets. In Latin America in particular, political instability, currency volatility, and evolving regulatory frameworks have required us to strengthen our approach to contractual risk allocation, investment protection mechanisms, and cross-border dispute resolution strategies. We have paid close attention to the interplay between bilateral investment treaties and local regulatory changes, ensuring that our concession agreements and corporate structures remain resilient.

At the EU level, the increasing regulatory intensity has also added a layer of complexity to our operations. As an infrastructure operator, Abertis sits at the intersection of public interest and private investment, which means that regulatory developments in this area directly affect how we structure transactions and engage with public authorities. The legal team has had to develop a more proactive, intelligence-led approach to geopolitical risk, working closely with our business and government affairs colleagues to anticipate regulatory shifts before they materialise.

From your perspective, what legal or business trends over the past 12 months have had the most tangible impact on your role? Are there specific regulatory developments, at Spanish or EU level, that you believe other in-house teams should be paying closer attention to?

Several regulatory developments have had a direct and tangible impact on how our legal team operates. At the EU level, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) has been perhaps the most significant, requiring us to fundamentally rethink how we approach ESG disclosure, data governance, and supply chain due diligence. For a company of Abertis’s scale and international reach, the compliance architecture needed to support CSRD obligations is substantial, and the legal team has played a central role in coordinating that effort across jurisdictions.

I would also highlight the continued evolution of EU competition and state aid rules as they apply to infrastructure concessions, as well as the growing body of regulation around artificial intelligence and digital services. In-house teams – particularly those in regulated sectors or with significant public-facing operations – should be investing time now in understanding the AI Act’s implications for their organisations, as the compliance requirements are both novel and technically demanding.

Finally, I would encourage fellow general counsel to watch closely the development of EU’s concession and public procurement framework. There is meaningful legislative activity in this space that will have lasting implications for how infrastructure projects are structured and governed.