Career Biography:

Kate Southwell is a General Counsel, an experienced NED, and has built her career by bringing a dynamic, pragmatic and commercial focus to create value, communicate complex legal and regulatory problems in an accessible way, and minimise risk. She is admitted to practice in the UK and New York, fluent in French and conversant in Spanish and German. She has lived and worked in multiple jurisdictions and demonstrated flexibility, tenacity and diplomacy while working on projects in Europe, Asia, Australia, North America/Canada and Africa.

Southwell has over 15 years of experience working with mining companies, trading companies and finance providers across various geographies and commodities. Her expertise includes leading transformational M&A, the structuring of private equity investments, managing the project financing process, coordinating due diligence, negotiating commercial agreements, improving corporate governance, advising on sustainability and climate change, managing litigation and liaising with regulators, governments and other key stakeholders.

Southwell trained at Shearman & Sterling in London before moving to New York. Prior to joining Anglo American in 2023, Kate was General Counsel at Pala Investments, a mining focused private equity fund based in Zug, Switzerland.

In her current role as Group General Counsel of Anglo American plc, a FTSE listed global diversified mining company, Southwell oversees the Legal and Compliance teams. She has played a pivotal, strategic role within the business, bringing legal insight to deliver true business impact. This is demonstrated in the defence of a takeover approach from BHP in 2024, and the subsequent support provided in the delivery of multiple large-scale divestment and demerger processes as part of the Group’s accelerated strategy to simplify its portfolio. This is all while delivering other strategic priorities, such as using the company’s litigation data to enable strategic planning and decision-making to materially improve business outcomes, and supporting the development of the company’s earlier stage projects, such as the Sakatti project in Finland which recently received Critical Project status by the European Commission under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act.

The most recently-announced proposed merger with Teck to form a global critical minerals champion is the latest of Southwell’s and the broader legal team’s achievements. Again, by being at the forefront of the largest mining deal in a decade, Southwell was able to balance legal insight with the business’ shared strategic priorities to support in the architecture of a deal which will unlock outstanding value both in the near and longer term.

Transactions and wider legal work aside, Southwell is passionate about building successful teams, supporting and developing the careers of others and building a pipeline of talent for the future. People are at the heart of how Southwell operates; she has led her team through change and uncertainty, spearheading a number of initiatives to support the creation of a culture of openness, resilience, agility and excellence.