Royal DSM, a materials sciences company, has appointed Cees Los to the roles of general counsel and director of legal affairs.
Los will report to Feike Sijbesma, CEO and chairman of the managing board of the Netherlands-based company. He will succeed Pieter de Haan, the current incumbent who is leaving for health reasons.
Los has a wide range of international experience in legal affairs and has worked with several large, multinational companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, the global oil and gas company. Most recently, he was general counsel with LyondellBasell, a chemical company. Prior to this move, much of his experience was from Shell, which he joined in 1984 as a member of corporate legal department in The Hague, the Netherlands, specializing in labor and corporate law.
According to Bloomberg, from 1988 to 1991 Los was a manager for legal affairs at his first joint venture company, IBIS, a biotechnology company based in the Netherlands. After three years he was transferred to Tokyo for his next legal assignment, where he was senior legal advisor for Showa Shell and Shell Japan from 1991 to 1995.
The international lawyer served as corporate planning manager with Shell in the Netherlands for a period of three years, from 1995 to 1998. In 1998, he relocated to Strasbourg, France where he headed up the legal department of one of Basell's predecessor companies, Elenac, from 1998 to 2000.
