About

Highly proficient in all relevant legal affairs related to multinational construction and development company Skanska’s business remit, the organisation’s Group legal department led by Caroline Fellenius-Omnell operates with a high focus on ethics and corporate governance. Indeed, Skanska Group’s legal affairs team – which is based at Skanska’s headquarters in Stockholm – consists of a spilt between legal and ethics, with nine lawyers in total, two of whom work specifically on ethics affairs, in addition to one ethics specialist and one paralegal. Issues dealt with by the team include corporate legal matters and providing support to the board and company leadership team, headquarters and all business units on a range of matters. Fellenius-Omnell states that these matters include ‘regulatory, compliance, group funding, project financing, guarantees, contracts and claims and litigations’, evincing the versatility and variety of the team. Lawyers in the team each have their own area of expertise. Elisabeth Berg, who is described as ‘the lawyer who has been longest in the team’ is said to support on ‘a wide range of matters, specifically related to the Group’s treasury and finance department, including assisting Skanska’s global risk team in project reviews. Another senior lawyer, Agne Sandberg, previously the general counsel for Skanska’s infrastructure development business and with experience from closing down Skanska’s operations in Latin America, focuses on complex litigations and claims’. Detailing the aforementioned efforts on ethical matters, Fellenius-Omnell explains there are ‘two lawyers and one ethics specialist’ supporting the ethics side of the function, including vice president of ethics Helena Sundén. The responsibilities for this part of the team include ‘managing the Hotline function, investigations, trainings on code of conduct, ethics risk reviews [and] risk assessments’. In addition, the Group legal function oversees and coordinates some of the work of the legal functions in the business units, comprising an additional 130 company lawyers. Overseeing a significant change to its team in the last two years, Skanska Group’s legal department has increased in size dramatically; previously just two lawyers and a paralegal, its current 11 member team has grown thanks to an increased demand for legal support from the business as well as the combination of two teams that previously dealt with corporate legal and financing and guarantees separately. Legal has taken a ‘leading role’ in corporate governance in line with Skanska’s organisational changes, this revised governance framework has seen a new Assurance and Control group function created which is also reporting in to the legal function. Led with a distinctly strategic mind set, the team has had a strong focus on leveraging the role of the legal function within Skanska’s business, in places such as the company headquarters and within different business units. Fellenius-Omnell explains that this has been done in a number of different ways, such as ‘ensuring that the lawyers are involved early enough, in the right processes and in the right decision making forums’. To this end, there has been a noted increase in company lawyers joining management teams, as well in other facets of the business such as tender boards, risk reviews, quarterly reviews and project reviews. The legal team’s involvement in business affairs has led to it become indispensable when Skanska is involved in major transactions, claims and litigations during its projects. Playing a ‘supporting role’ during these occasions, the Group legal team has ‘directly or indirectly been involved in many large projects in Sweden and abroad. The team is also directly handling some complex litigations in Latin America and other parts of the world’.