S9E3 | From the ground up: How Frontera created an effective E&C program

Building an effective ethics and compliance program from scratch, or after a restructuring or merger, is not an easy task. How do you structure the program and empower people throughout to do the right thing? In this episode of LRN’s Principled Podcast, host Susan Divers talks with Luz María Zea Cabrera, the chief compliance officer at Frontera Energy, about how to build an E&C program from the ground up. Listen in as Luz María shares her approach to creating an ethical and sustainable culture and getting buy-in from the wider organization. 

 

Guest: Luz María Zea Cabrera

Luz María Zea Cabrera is a lawyer and Commercial Law specialist from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Colombia, LLM from Georgetown University.  She is married and has two children. 

Luz María has extensive and diverse experience in ethics, compliance, and management. For more than 20 years, she has led legal teams in Colombia, the Andean region, and Europe in multinational companies. For more than 10 years, she has structured and executed business integrity programs with local, regional, and global scope.   

As a compliance officer in oil and gas companies, she has led the design and implementation of the Corporate Integrity System, a risk prevention system for money laundering, financing of terrorism, financing of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, corruption, and privacy protection.  

For Luz María, the most important thing about an entity's compliance program is that it is understood and owned by everybody in the organization, that it is lived by all as a reflection of the corporation’s culture and as an exercise of their own personal values, and that individuals proudly act as Integrity Influencers at all times and before all stakeholders.

 

Host: Susan Divers

Susan Divers is the director of thought leadership and best practices with LRN Corporation. She brings 30+ years’ accomplishments and experience in the ethics and compliance arena to LRN clients and colleagues. This expertise includes building state-of-the-art compliance programs infused with values, designing user-friendly means of engaging and informing employees, fostering an embedded culture of compliance, and sharing substantial subject matter expertise in anti-corruption, export controls, sanctions, and other key areas of compliance. Prior to joining LRN, Mrs. Divers served as AECOM’s Assistant General for Global Ethics & Compliance and Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer. Under her leadership, AECOM’s ethics and compliance program garnered six external awards in recognition of its effectiveness and Mrs. Divers’ thought leadership in the ethics field. In 2011, Mrs. Divers received the AECOM CEO Award of Excellence, which recognized her work in advancing the company’s ethics and compliance program. Before joining AECOM, she worked at SAIC and Lockheed Martin in the international compliance area. Prior to that, she was a partner with the DC office of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal. She also spent four years in London and is qualified as a Solicitor to the High Court of England and Wales, practicing in the international arena with the law firms of Theodore Goddard & Co. and Herbert Smith & Co. She also served as an attorney in the Office of the Legal Advisor at the Department of State and was a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN working on the first anti-corruption multilateral treaty initiative.  Mrs. Divers is a member of the DC Bar and a graduate of Trinity College, Washington D.C. and of the National Law Center of George Washington University. In 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 Ethisphere Magazine listed her as one the “Attorneys Who Matter” in the ethics & compliance area. She is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Rutgers University Center for Ethical Behavior and served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Institute for Practical Training from 2005-2008. She resides in Northern Virginia and is a fr