| General counsel |
The Legal Business global GC power listPioneering spirits, influential powerbrokers, deal makers, litigators and rising stars: Legal Business selects the world’s top corporate counsel. By Anthony Notaras, with additional material by Tom Freeman and Sam Kenworthy
Finding 15 minutes to talk to Barclays Bank’s general counsel Mark Harding isn’t easy. He’s a busy man, with day-to-day legal issues to attend to and external lawyers to instruct. There’s also the minor matter of Barclays’ possible union with the Dutch bank ABN Amro. Should it go ahead, it will be the largest financial institution merger of all time, worth just under £45.6bn, going by Barclays’ original share offer. At press time, a consortium led by The Royal Bank of Scotland was doing its very best to scupper the deal with its own counter-offer. Few will argue when Harding says he’s got a few things on his plate right now. ‘It’s a very interesting job to be involved in, and boy am I involved,’ he tells LB. ‘I’ve never been so busy in my life.’ It’s a sentiment echoed by several of the general counsel and in-house lawyers profiled in this feature. Marco Pagni, company secretary and general counsel of Alliance Boots, has some sympathy for Harding. ‘He’s really in the thick of it,’ he says. Not that Pagni has been taking it easy. Currently advising his company on its £11.1bn takeover by private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (KKR) and Alliance Boots’ deputy chairman, Stefano Pessina, he is at the business end of Europe’s largest leveraged buyout (not to mention the first time a FTSE-100 company has been taken private).‘There has never been a dull moment between merging with Boots and this transaction. It’s been a rollercoaster 18 months,’ Pagni says. His former company, Alliance UniChem, completed its £8.1bn merger with Boots last July, leaving him with just a few months to draw breath before KKR stepped in. ‘Working in-house with a dynamic and growing employer is a fantastic career path for an ambitious lawyer,’ says Pagni. ‘I’ve been fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time from that point of view. It’s exciting and one of the reasons why big companies are attracting the best talent out of private practice.’ To read the rest of this article subscribe to Legal Business.  |
