Maaike de Bie set to join Vodafone as general counsel

Maaike de Bie set to join Vodafone as general counsel

She will succeed Rosemary Martin who retires in March 2023

The Vodafone Group has announced that Maaike de Bie, the highly regarded general counsel at easyJet, will be joining the firm next year.

The firm stated that its longstanding general counsel, Rosemary Martin, one of the UK's leading in-house lawyers, is set to retire next year at the end of March. She worked with the wireless giant firm for 12 years as a general counsel and company secretary.

Martin stated, "I have been very fortunate to have worked in fine organizations with great colleagues and advisers on challenging and interesting assignments around the world. Thank you, everyone. I wish de Bie every success."

De Bie spent five years rising through the ranks at Royal Mail to become group general counsel before joining easyJet in 2019. She was instrumental in the company witnessing nearly double her team's headcount and launching an internal training academy to school junior lawyers on soft skills, including networking, leadership, and traditional legal training.

At easyJet, she led a team of 75 and earned accolades for her work guiding the airline through the significant challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. This included a legal disagreement with the UK government over quarantine regulations and a cyberattack.

An easyJet spokesperson remarked, "Group general counsel and company secretary Maaike de Bie is leaving easyJet to join Vodafone early next year and we would like to thank her for her contribution to the airline over the past three-and-a-half years.

Meanwhile, Martin had earlier served as a general counsel for Reuters for over a decade. Prior to that, she spent 14 years at the legacy firm Rowe & Maw, where she began her legal career in 1981 and eventually entered a partnership.

She played a key role in the development of the GC position in the UK and in numerous ESG initiatives. Recently, she conducted a legal panel refresh at Vodafone that saw firms being selected on the basis of a mutual commitment to promote diversity targets and ESG best practices.

The veteran lawyer led a 450-member team at Vodafone, overseeing complex litigation and arbitration, including a victory in an international arbitration case in 2020. The tribunal in The Hague had then rejected a $2bn tax liability imposed on the company by the Government of India.

She was also at the helm when Vodafone completed its $21.3bn acquisition of Liberty Global's cable systems in Eastern Europe and Germany in 2018, to date the company's largest acquisition.