(Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a comment from Andrew Mac.)
Andrew Mac, a partner at Ukraine’s largest law firm who was once ranked by the Kyiv Post as among Ukraine’s most influential foreigners, has become President Volodymyr Zelensky’s freelance adviser on diaspora issues.
Mac is the head of Asters’ Washington D.C. office and is an expert in cross-border deals involving the United States, Ukraine and members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. According to the firm, he specializes in mergers & acquisitions, corporate and competition law, corporate compliance, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, capital markets and state regulations.
The president’s website broke the news in a brief announcement on Nov. 5.
Mac told the Kyiv Post that his parents come from Western Ukraine and instilled in him a deep sense of attachment to the country.
“Some weeks after the President took office, I reconnected with old acquaintances who joined the President’s team and in due time they asked my view how best to strengthen existing bridges and build new ones between the diaspora and Ukraine,” Mac wrote in an email. “Recently, I had an opportunity to share my insights and ideas with the President. Shortly thereafter I was asked to become a formal adviser to the President on diaspora issues.”
Mac was born in New York City but grew up in the Philadelphia area. He got his bachelor’s degree in international relations from Lehigh University and his law degree from Vanderbilt University Law School. He was initially recruited as a senior lawyer by PricewaterhouseCoopers for their Kyiv office in 2002.
While Mac had intended to spend two years in Kyiv, in 2004 he witnessed the Orange Revolution, which inspired him to stay longer, he told the Kyiv Post in a 2010 interview. The same year as the revolution, he was offered a partnership with Magisters, a major law firm founded in Kyiv that operated in post-Soviet countries. He became managing partner at the firm in 2009.
Magisters merged with Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners in July 2011. Mac, who speaks English, Russian and Ukrainian, said in 2011 that he would establish a Washington DC office for the merged firm. He later headed up EPAM USA PLLC, an independent Washington firm associated with Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Mac had been a partner at Asters since Oct. 2018.
According to Asters, Mac has a great deal of experience working on compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a U.S. law that forbids U.S. firms and individuals from bribing foreign officials to advance business deals.
This experience has included ensuring an international pharmaceutical company’s compliance with FCPA. Mac has also worked on a FCPA violation investigation at a U.S.-based manufacturer’s subsidiary, as well as FCPA due diligence involving two telecommunications companies undergoing acquisition.
He has also worked on cases of alleged customs fraud by a major international investor in Ukraine and the alleged fraudulent interaction of a nuclear company’s assignor with Ukrainian and European officials.
