Ventas appoints next general counsel

Carey Roberts is joining Chicago-based Ventas as executive vice president, general counsel and ethics & compliance officer during the first quarter of 2020.

Roberts will move to Ventas from Assurant, where she has been executive vice president, chief legal officer and corporate secretary. Before that, she was deputy general counsel, corporate secretary and chief compliance officer at Marsh & McLennan Companies.

Earlier in her career, Roberts was a partner in the corporate practice of law firm Covington & Burling, where she advised companies in industries such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and information technology.

In her new position, she will lead Ventas’ legal, compliance and enterprise risk-management functions and report to chair and CEO Debra Cafaro. Roberts will succeed Richard Riney, the company’s first general counsel, who retired recently.

S&P 500 member Ventas is a real estate investment trust with a portfolio of roughly 1,200 assets in the US, Canada and the UK consisting of senior housing communities, medical office buildings, university-based research and innovation centers, in-patient rehabilitation and long-term acute care facilities and health systems.

‘We are thrilled to welcome Carey Roberts to our executive leadership team. As a successful public company general counsel with an outstanding legal career, she brings extensive experience, energy, judgment and intellect to Ventas, complemented by her proven ability to serve as a partner and legal adviser to boards of directors and management teams,’ Cafaro says in a statement.

‘We thank Richard Riney, our long-serving and talented original general counsel, for his incredible contributions to Ventas. Rick demonstrated unbounded integrity and loyalty as an inspirational leader of the company for more than two decades.’