Spanish oil giant Cepsa fills vacant CLO seat with Atento hire

Virginia Beltramini will take up the role in September, replacing Jörg Häring who left in May

Spanish oil and gas heavyweight Cepsa has appointed Virginia Beltramini as chief legal officer, replacing Jörg Häring who left the company earlier this year.

Beltramini joins from Spanish outsourcing services business Atento, where she was general counsel and board secretary. At Cepsa, she will be responsible for all legal matters and join the company’s management committee. She will take up her new role on 16 September and report directly to CEO Maarten Wetselaar.

Madrid-based Cepsa is Spain’s second-largest oil major after Repsol. It has operations in Algeria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Morocco and Panama, as well as in Europe.

In a statement the company said Beltramini brings more than 20 years of experience in transforming global companies, particularly in the BTO services, digital and real estate sectors, as well as in M&A and finance. It added that she has extensive experience and knowledge of legal and regulatory issues.

Beltramini arrives after 13 years at Atento, the past seven of them as GC. Before that she was a legal director at Spanish engineering company Oesia and a corporate lawyer at real estate businesses Metrovacesa and Grupo Lar. She also previously worked at EY, having started her career at P&A Abogados in Madrid.

Häring, meantime, left Cepsa in May after three years with the company to join German healthcare business Fresenius Medical Care. He previously spent more than 15 years at Siemens across a number of roles, including as GC of Siemens Energy and GC of Siemens Digital Industries. He started his legal career at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Frankfurt and Brussels.

In other recent in-house oil and gas-related moves, last month ExxonMobil named former Fox lawyer Jeff Taylor as its next GC, replacing Craig Morford who retired at the start of this month. In April, the world’s largest oil company Saudi Aramco hired former Haleon legal head Bjarne Philip Tellman as its deputy GC to oversee global compliance.

And in December last year, BP promoted its legal SVP Michael Sosso to succeed legal chief Eric Nitcher, who left at the end of the year in the wake of CEO Bernard Looney’s resignation earlier in 2023.

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