One night in December last year, corporate lawyer Roberto Guerrero Valenzuela took his cell phone and dialed the number of Rafael Minguez, partner of the Spanish firm Cuatrecasas, who was staying at the Intercontinental Hotel in Vitacura, in the heart of Sanhattan.
Just a few hours earlier, both lawyers had met at a working dinner to negotiate a possible alliance between Cuatrecasas, one of the largest law firms in the Spanish-speaking world that was seeking to settle in Santiago, and the Guerrero Olivos law firm, one of the law firms most important corporations in Chile. On the part of the Chileans, the negotiation that night was led by Roberto Guerrero, managing partner of the office, and Juan Enrique Allard, partner of the same, among others. On the Spanish side, Minguez led a team of three.
For Guerrero Olivo’s lawyers, allying with Cuatrecasas – which has its headquarters in Barcelona and employs more than 1,700 professionals in 29 offices in 14 countries – meant jumping into the big global leagues. They were so interested in facilitating the arrival of the Spanish, that they were even willing to be acquired.
However, Guerrero Olivos was not the only local corporate law firm with which the Spanish were talking. Since at least October 2019, Cuatrecasas has held meetings with other law firms dedicated to the business world, including Larraín y Asociados (founded by Carlos Larraín, former president of RN), and Morales & Besa (which defends creditors in the process. Latam bankruptcy).
“For Roberto to go with the Spanish there would be nothing wrong if it weren’t for the fact that he was the administrator of Guerrero Olivos, and he was also in charge of the merger negotiations,” says a source.
During the working dinner, the negotiations between Guerrero Olivos and Cuatrecasas did not prosper much. For this reason, Roberto Guerrero decided to call the Spanish. He needed to talk to them that night, he told them, because something important had been left in the pipeline. According to various sources consulted, around midnight the Chilean lawyer met with his European counterparts at the hotel where they were staying. But this time he was going alone, without his other partners who were not aware of this management.
And so began a story that some call treason, to the point that the Chilean law firm has analyzed filing a criminal action against Roberto Guerrero himself.
The last to turn off the light
The next day, a person from the Cuatrecasas negotiating team told the other Guerrero Olivo partners about the night excursion. Roberto Guerrero would have told them that, if an alliance with his study did not prosper, he would still be willing to go to the future office of the Spanish in Chile.
The revelation spread like a cluster bomb. How was it possible that Guerrero, whom all the partners had sent to explore a partnership with Cuatrecasas on behalf of the firm, negotiate behind their back for himself? That same day they confronted him in a meeting. “How can they believe such gossip?” Guerrero would have defended himself. “If something happened to this firm, I would be the last one to turn off the light. I’m going to die in this office ”.
His words served to calm things down a bit. After all, the partner in question was the son of Roberto Guerrero del Río, who founded the law firm in the late 1980s alongside UDI Colonel Jovino Novoa, Pinochet’s former minister Hernán Felipe Errázuriz, and Carlos Olivos. The idea was to be a boutique studio dedicated to foreign investment in Chile.
But the tension between Guerrero Olivos’ partners persisted. In a meeting between all that was held in March in a restaurant in Zapallar, Roberto Guerrero informed them that the negotiations with Cuatrecasas had failed, but that now they were probing him personally to join and be a partner in their future office in Chile. There, several exploded and rebuked him. “The negotiations failed because you offered yourself,” snapped one of them.
In April Cuatrecasas finally opened its office in Santiago. He commanded Cristián Conejeros Roos, an expert lawyer in international arbitration who since 2013 was a partner at Philippi Prietocarrizosa Ferrero DU & Uria. Known as PPU, this study arose from the merger between the Colombian company Prietocarrizosa, the Peruvian companies Ferrero Abogados and Delmar Ugarte and the Chilean Philippi, Yrarrázaval, Pulido & Brunner. Before, Conejeros had already been a partner of Cuatrecasas between 2007 and 2013.
And Roberto Guerrero continued in the office founded by his father. Or so many believed.
A troubled partner
At the end of November, Guerrero officially announced his incorporation as a partner to Cuatrecasas Chile. Many lawyers in the square speculate that it took seven months to join the new office, presumably because of the Spanish caution not to immediately lift the star lawyer from another firm in such controversial conditions.
“If he left with the Spanish there would be nothing wrong if it weren’t for the fact that he was the administrator of Guerrero Olivos, and he was also in charge of the merger negotiations,” says a source who has been aware of these acts. “He ended up using his role in administration for his own benefit.”
In the seven months between the official arrival of Cuatrecasas in April and the incorporation of Guerrero in November, the latter continued to act as administrator of the firm. And as such he made a series of decisions such as modifying the lease of the office they have in the Titanium tower to increase the space, despite probably knowing that he and some of his close ones would soon go with the Spanish. “That’s totally wrong,” says a lawyer who works for another firm. “In the end what he did is that he negotiated for himself and not for the office, he used that assignment to present himself to the people of Cuatrecasas,” says this person. “Guerrero showed a manipulative, dark and crooked style.”
The pressure to remove Jovino Novoa from the study in 2015 paid off. But not without first paying him a compensation of about 400 million pesos.
Sources familiar with the plot assure that several partners of the Guerrero Olivos law firm have studied the possibility of filing a complaint against their former partner for “unfair administration.” “They have evaluated a lot of criminal charges against Roberto,” says one of them. “But they haven’t, at least not yet, mainly for a reputational issue.”
A person who knows Guerrero affirms that he did not take advantage of the situation. “Things just happened like this, and the Spanish preferred to raise individual lawyers instead of an alliance with some firm.”
Some Guerrero Olivos partners think it is better to turn the page, say lawyers familiar with this plot. What’s more, they even believe that Guerrero’s departure is a relief and point to a series of problems they have had with him over the years. The biggest? The study’s link to the SQM scandal.
The SQM case
Pressured by the partners of the firm, in January 2015 former senator Jovino Novoa had to leave the firm he had founded with Roberto Guerrero’s father. The case of illegal financing of politics by SQM and Penta was splattering Novoa. Indeed, in July of that year he was formalized by the Public Ministry, and a few months later he was sentenced to three years of remitted sentence, suspension of his power to hold public office and fines.
With his departure, the name that the firm had carried since 1988 also ended. Guerrero, Olivos, Novoa and Errázuriz were renamed Guerrero Olivos.
But not only the union was in the crosshairs of the prosecution. So was Roberto Guerrero del Río, who through a company called Guerrero y Compañía had issued invoices for 600 million pesos to SQM between 2009 and 2013 as revealed The counter in November 2015. In that investigation, the then legal vice president of SQM, Patricio Matías Astaburuaga, declared in April 2015 that “Guerrero y Cía. neither have they been hired nor have they provided services for the SQM prosecutor’s office “, assuring that” I did not authorize payments for services of 10 million a month to Guerrero y Cía. “
“Guerrero y Cía was triangulating money to benefit Novoa,” says a judicial source who knows this edge closely. “Guerrero y Cía. he sent ideologically false ballots to SQM and then Novoa sent ballots to Guerrero y Cía. to receive the money, ”he says. “In my opinion that could be called money laundering.”
“When it appeared in the press that the Guerrero Olivos study paid Novoa some silver that it received from SQM, a lot of annoyance was generated among the younger partners,” says a lawyer close to some of them. “But the oldest, among them Roberto Guerrero Sr., mentioned that what was involved was that when Jovino was elected senator it was considered that he was going to earn little money and was sacrificing himself, he was making a very great sacrifice for the Republic and thus he got SQM and other companies to pay him an additional monthly salary. In the case of SQM, it was 10 million per month ”.
Finally, the pressure to remove Novoa from the study paid off. But not without first paying him a compensation of about 400 million pesos, according to some insiders of the internal plot.
At that time, the managing partner of the study was also Roberto Guerrero Valenzuela, who strongly defended the practice carried out by his father. “When the Jovino Novoa and the political silvers happened, the partners removed Roberto from the administration, but later (in 2019) they put him back in,” says a source. “So now with the Cuatrecasas issue he incurs something irregular again, it is like a double betrayal.”
Erasing the past
This Friday, January 1, Roberto Guerrero begins his working life at the Spanish giant Cuatrecasas, which last year had a turnover of more than 300 million euros. According to the Hispanic firm itself, the focus is on “offering advice on local law to the large group of Spanish companies operating in Chile and taking advantage of synergies with the other offices of the study, in the region and on other continents.”
But this lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions, and banking and financial law – considered one of the partners that brought the most clients and businesses to the Chilean firm – does not go alone. Along with him he also takes his closest team: Macarena Ravinet, Tomás Kubik and Josefina Yávar. With this, the Guerrero Olivos firm loses four of the nine partner lawyers in the corporate area.
The relationship between Guerrero, his old studio and Cuatrecasas was stressed to the maximum. A small sample of this is the curriculum that the Spanish firm publishes of him on its website.
“Before joining Cuatrecasas, (Guerrero) worked as a foreign associate at the US firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York.” It is a job he held for a year in the mid-1990s, after completing a master’s in law at New York University.
There is no mention of his work in Guerrero Olivos, where he spent almost 30 years.
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