Roberta Gallardo

Roberta Gallardo has been a partner at Arias since 2007. She joined the firm in 1999, becoming an Associate in 2003, with emphasis on corporate, commercial, contracts, mergers and acquisitions, and competition.

Her experience is initially developed in the corporate area, providing advice to national and international companies with a presence in the Central American region, as well as to companies with their operation in El Salvador attending to their daily legal needs. She has also assisted multinational companies in the establishment of their businesses or start of operations in the country, accompanying them through the corporate and regulatory processes related to the business. As part of her corporate practice, Roberta has experience providing legal advice in corporate law to companies subject to special regimes such as the International Services Law, as well as in the legal formalization of contracts of various kinds for these companies.

Other areas of practice include mergers and acquisitions and project finance, having been involved in large-scale transactions over the past 20 years. Her practice also includes financing and complex structuring issues.

She has coordinated and advised numerous mergers and acquisitions transactions, analyzed competition aspects related to concentrations, participated in financing, assisted companies in the establishment of their local businesses, as well as in restructurings and shareholder relations.

She has also advised regulatory authorization processes of transactions in different sectors, successfully.

• Sale of the operations of Telefonica in El Salvador, seller entity of the Telefonica business in El Salvador.
• Roberta advised Telefónica, S.A., TLK Investments, C.V. and Telefónica Centroamérica Inversiones, S.L., as selling companies, in the execution of the share purchase agreement regarding the sale of 100% of its interest in the operations in El Salvador in favour of General International Telcom Limited, a sale valued at 144 million dollars. The closing of the sale took place in January and was subject to the authorizations of the corresponding regulatory (antitrust) authority. The regulatory process and closing were also advised by the firm.
• Roberta advised Procaps Group in the review of the Notes Purchase and Guarantee Agreement, the compliance of contractual conditions in El Salvador, including the preparation of the respective corporate resolutions, issuance of Director´s Certificates, and issuance of its legal opinion, as well as the preparation and review of all related legal documentation. Procaps Group, through its subsidiary Procaps, S.A., launched a private offering of an aggregate principal amount of US$ 115MM of senior notes, secured by different subsidiaries of the group in different countries, such as Colombia, Brazil, and El Salvador, in a private placement transaction led by Prudential Private Capital, to entities including one or more investment funds or managed accounts, with a final maturity of 10 years and amortization payments starting on the sixth anniversary of the closing of the transaction.
• IDB Invest, a member of the IDB Group, provided a $75 million loan to Corporación Multi Inversiones (CMI Alimentos) with the objective of ensuring its liquidity in the medium term and supporting the continuity and reactivation of its operations. The deal reinforces food security and income generation in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Roberta was counsel to Inter-American Investment Corporation in the different stages of the transaction: conducting the Due Diligence; review and legal assistance for negotiation and preparation of Term Sheet; review of the Loan Agreement and related documentation; negotiation and preparation of all documentation governed by local law; and matters at closing and after the closing of the transaction

• Banking and finance
• Corporate and M&A
• Private equity

• Banking and financial services
• Consumer goods and services
• Insurance

• International Bar Association (IBA)

• Law Degree from Universidad Dr. José Matías Delgado with honors, june 2003.
• Authorized as a Practicing Attorney (2005) and Notary Public (2014) by the Supreme Court of Justice of El Salvador.
• Program of Negotiation for Lawyers (PIL) at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, june 2004.
• Leading Organizations and Change course taught by MIT Sloan School of Management and Emeritus, June 2020.
• Candidate for the Executive MBA-UC International Guatemala Program for the period 2022/2024.