Leanne Geale, chief ethics and compliance officer at Royal Dutch Shell, is joining Nestlé to serve as the Swiss company's executive vice-president and general counsel.

Geale begins her new role on August 1 and will oversee the global food and drink company's legal and compliance functions, Nestlé announced on Friday. The company's chief legal officer, Ricardo Cortes-Monroy, and its senior vice-president of governance, compliance and corporate services, David Frick, will report to Geale. She'll be based at Nestlé's headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, according to a spokesperson for the company. 

Frick is slated to leave Nestlé's executive board on July 31, but will continue to serve as senior vice-president and board secretary.

Nestlé group CEO Mark Schneider trumpeted Geale's "extensive legal, compliance and corporate governance experience in industry-leading global companies". He added in a written statement that she's "perfectly qualified to lead the newly combined legal and compliance group and to drive a coordinated strategy and greater synergies between these two important functions".

Geale has worked in Shell's legal department since 2003, when she joined the company's Canadian subsidiary as senior solicitor. She went on to hold several in-house leader roles, including associate general counsel and head of legal for Shell Canada.

As chief ethics and compliance officer, Geale has worked in the Netherlands alongside Shell's legal director and other legal leaders overseeing a team of about 750 lawyers. She's also responsible for the company's anti-bribery and corruption programme.

Before she joined Shell, Geale was senior counsel for the Royal Bank of Canada and also served as senior counsel for Canadian mining company Rio Algom Ltd., and as counsel for Canada's Alcan Aluminum Ltd.

Geale, who could not be reached for comment, discussed the importance of ethics and compliance in a 2015 interview with the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She said at the time that the "increasing complexity of the regulatory environment is such a challenge".

"This creates an increasing risk of conflict of law as well as ambiguity – often a regulator is also grappling with what exactly it wants to see as compliance. This can put companies into rather difficult situations," she added. "In such situations, it is very helpful to be able to refer back to your core values and general business principles."

Geale also was candid about her experiences with outside counsel, saying she had "been surprised a few times about the lack of knowledge by external counsel, and even very senior partners, on what makes up the basics of a compliance programme".

She added: "I would expect that external counsel are familiar with the basics of such a programme, as well as the big-ticket compliance risks in whatever industry they might support a client."

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