Interview with Monidipa Fouzder
Former Deutsche Bank general counsel Simon Man is three months into his new job at the Government Legal Department when I meet him for a sit-down interview at GLD’s London office.
Man is director of Treasury legal advisers. In other words: GC for HM Treasury. Based at the Treasury’s headquarters in Horse Guards Road, he leads a specialist team providing advice on financial services, banking regulation and public finance matters. ‘I look after and manage the legal risk for Treasury business,’ he says.
Man oversees multiple teams. Within a few minutes of our chat, he takes me through a whistlestop tour of their work, supporting the government’s economic and finance ministry to maintain control over public spending, set the direction of the UK’s economic policy and achieve strong, sustainable growth.
Advisers work on the ‘constantly evolving’ legal framework for how the financial services industry operates, for example. They will be working and advising on the National Wealth Fund Bill, which will include drafting legislation to set up a National Wealth Fund and provide legal support on financial sanctions.
GLD is the largest provider of legal services across government, employing 3,400 people, including 2,600 solicitors and barristers. GLD is also arguably the country’s biggest in-house department.
Man says: ‘I have met a lot of GLD people. The one thread that is most impressive and drives why people are here is purpose. Here, the purpose is much clearer. They are making a positive difference to people in the UK. You can see clearly where your work fits into the wider work of government.’
Man’s parents came to the UK from Hong Kong. He qualified at Turner Kenneth Brown before it became Wilde Sapte and was sent out to Hong Kong before the handover. In 1997 he joined Bankers Trust, which was subsequently acquired by Deutsche Bank. His job saw him travel around Asia, doing finance and capital market deals. He returned to the UK in 2010 and became the bank’s first global head of documentation. He helped restructure the operating model for Deutsche Bank’s global legal department.
Man’s roles at Deutsche Bank included head of asset and wealth management, and head of regulatory. He led the bank through MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive), Brexit and Covid.
After nearly three decades there, why move to the public sector? Man said he has enjoyed ‘a lot of luck and success’ and felt obliged to ‘pay it forward’.
He met his GLD predecessor, Peter King, at a roundtable event. ‘The GC role is being able to look around the corners and understand the chessboard as you advise your client how to go forward. You need to have that wider chessboard and vision. Peter was doing this for the Treasury, which was at the centre of quite a lot of what was going on.’
Man sees the in-house function as ‘bridging the gap of understanding’ between the client, businesspeople and outsiders.
While an in-house function has external counsel, Man says the latter will not always fully understand the client. ‘As the in-house counsel, you understand your policy colleagues, their risk appetite, what you can agree to and need to challenge, how certain messages will land internally, to translate what is said by external counsel.’
Man brings with him to GLD ‘lived experience’ of working in the banking sector. ‘You can draft law but what does it mean to implement that?’ He has experience of dealing with regulatory challenges and translating legislation into what that means for the business.
But while he brings with him an ‘outside view’ of how things are done, what he has seen at the GLD is a ‘highly professional, very high-quality’ team. ‘They don’t just understand the subject matter, which is pretty difficult if you have not been in banking, but they have skills you will not find outside GLD.’
As he embarks on a new chapter in his career, what does he miss about Deutsche Bank? ‘I miss the colleagues. I spent 27 years in one place because I had fantastic support. I had a great relationship with people across the bank.’
Simon Man is director of Treasury legal advisers, Government Legal Department
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