Regional Southeast Asian law firm Tilleke & Gibbins is pleased to announce the promotion of two exceptional lawyers to the firm’s partnership, effective January 2023. Chuyen Hong Huu Le  is based in Tilleke & Gibbins’ Ho Chi Minh City office, where she is a trusted commercial adviser to some of the most prominent international companies doing business in Southeast Asia—particularly in the aviation, life sciences, and hospitality sectors. A seasoned and practical corporate attorney with a wide range of expertise, Chuyen is particularly adept at matters relating to foreign investment and market entry, labor and employment, commercial transactions and M&A, compliance and investigations, anti-bribery and anti-corruption, and antitrust and competition. Chuyen has particular expertise in the healthcare sector (including pharmaceuticals, medtech and consumer health), where she has advised many top multinational companies on doing business in Vietnam. She also has extensive experience in the aviation sector, and assists clients with aircraft leasing/financing, aircraft-related interest registrations, and repossession. Chuyen is a Certified Compliance and Ethics Professional – International (CCEP-I) and is regularly engaged by companies to conduct compliance investigations and audits, as well as to provide compliance training sessions for staff and business partners. She has also built extensive in-house experience through secondments as chief legal counsel in Vietnam for the world’s largest three-sector healthcare company, and as an in-house counsel for Vietnam at a world-leading medical device company operating in orthodontics. In 2021, Chuyen was recognized in Euromoney’s Rising Stars Awards Asia-Pacific. Noppramart Thammateeradaycho  is an experienced Thai litigator with over 20 years’ experience of trial and appellate advocacy at all levels of the Thai courts, and of international arbitration including cases in Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, and Singapore. She is particularly sought after for her experience in arbitration and is known for her skilled navigation of both international

Michael Ramirez, a counsel in Tilleke & Gibbins’ dispute resolution group in Bangkok, will provide the Thailand legal outlook at a Thailand Regional Forum meeting to be held at Sasin School of Management on June 9, 2022. The event will be a special relaunch meeting of the Thailand Regional Forum, an initiative established by Dataconsult some 35 years ago. After a hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, the forum is restarting with Sasin School of Management as its new home. The Thailand Regional Forum at Sasin plans to hold regular meetings from July onward. The meeting will consist of forecasting panel presentations and roundtable discussions. In addition to Michael’s presentation of the legal outlook for Thailand, other speakers will offer insights into Thailand’s political, risk, economic, and human resources outlook in the coming year. Following the presentations, the speakers and attendees will participate in a roundtable discussions and Q&A to address any questions that came up during the session and to consider various potential scenarios. For more information on the Thailand Regional Forum, which offers memberships on a corporate basis, please see the Dataconsult website.

On May 31, 2022, Tilleke & Gibbins continued its collaboration with Anderson Mori & Tomotsune to offer a webinar entitled “Compliance Considerations in Thailand: What Companies Should Know.” During the session, which was translated into Japanese by Chieko Tsuchiya, a consultant in Tilleke & Gibbins’ dispute resolution department in Bangkok, John Frangos, partner and director of the department, addressed the following areas: The importance of compliance in Thailand; Key principles that make an effective compliance program, including the National Anti-Corruption Commission’s internal guidelines, risk assessments, policies and procedures, communication mechanisms, and audits and evaluations; and Case studies and practical considerations on how companies can reduce risks of wrongdoing activities.

Kobkit Thienpreecha, partner and director of the firm’s corporate and commercial group, and Nutavit Sirikan, an associate in the same department, authored an article published in the January–April issue of Dunlaphaha, the prestigious Thai-language journal of Thailand’s Court of Justice. With an English title of “The Challenges of Applying Trade Competition Act, B.E. 2560 (2017) to Digital Platform Businesses,” the article examines the challenges of applying the Trade Competition Act B.E. 2560 (2017) to digital platform businesses. As the authors explain in the article, digital platforms have a number of characteristics and idiosyncrasies that present unique difficulties when it comes to competition. The authors then go through the various regulatory proposals and academic discussions on potential legal solutions addressing competition issues involving digital platforms. As they point out, however, debates over the best approach to take toward these issues have persisted for decades, even in jurisdictions with mature legal and regulatory antitrust or competition regimes. It is thus fair to question whether the existing provisions of the Trade Competition Act are in fact able to address emerging legal concerns related to the operation of digital platform businesses in Thailand. By considering examples from other jurisdictions, the authors ultimately conclude that Thailand may need to amend some aspects of the Trade Competition Act and its subordinate legislation, even though the act’s existing provisions are sufficiently flexible in terms of interpretation and application to address some of the concerns relevant to digital platform businesses. Nevertheless, any future amendments or reformulations of criteria under Thailand’s competition law must be based on a thorough and accurate understanding of the market conditions for digital platforms. The full article (in Thai) can be downloaded through the button below.   This article was first published in Dunlaphaha: Journal of the Court of Justice, Issue 1, Year