Tell us about your legal career so far, and what led you to taking up this role.

I started working life as a litigation lawyer in one of the oldest Singapore law firms, handling all sorts of civil and criminal matters, and later corporate work. After a few years, I joined Baker McKenzie Singapore. To sharpen my saw, I was seconded to the firm’s Sydney and Melbourne offices for headline-grabbing private equity and public transactions.

In 2002, I joined semiconductor giant Infineon as their General Counsel - Asia, worked in Munich and had a fabulous time, including helping to build the iconic-looking Infineon Asia-Pacific building along PIE, and wafer fabs in Suzhou as well as Kulim in Malaysia.

I joined Mapletree in 2009, and we have a visionary Group CEO who made us into a real estate powerhouse with four REITs and seven private equity funds. About five years ago, I was entrusted with a wide spectrum of responsibilities as concurrent Group Chief Corporate Officer and it was an exhilarating journey.

What are some of the big challenges the business has been facing recently, and how are you looking to tackle them?

Mapletree started life with leftover non-port assets in Singapore. In the past 10 years, we grew in size from S$10 billion to S$78 billion with consistent good returns to our shareholder, as well as public and private fund investors.

In particular, in the last three years, we syndicated three private funds, raised S$5 billion and entered into many transactions as well as into new asset classes such as student accommodation and data centres.

The challenges are many. One has to begin with the end in mind and what are the non-negotiables. It requires excellent teamwork within my legal and corporate secretarial department, and relying on good sets of external lawyers.

What kind of role does your team play in relation to business strategy, and how has that evolved over the years?

We started with only in-house lawyers in Singapore, and I grew the department to have colleagues in Shanghai, New York, Amsterdam, Sydney, Warsaw and Ho Chi Minh City.

Today, we have 19 corporate counsel, with nine of us in Singapore, and a strong team of paralegals.

To us, the in-house team understands the business more than anyone else and needs to have entrenched fundamentals to enable us to grow and be resilient as a consistent high-return real estate business.