Marusa Freire

Marusa Vasconcelos Freire is legal counsel at the Central Bank of Brazil since 1994, having held the position of Vice General Counsel (2010-2011), Deputy General Counsel (2009-2010) and Chief Counsel of the Center for Legal Studies (2006-2009). Previously, she held the position of General Counsel for the Administrative Council of Economic Defense, the Brazilian Competition Law Agency (1996-1999). She is a specialist in Central Banking, Financial and Monetary Law and Financial Sector Regulation, as well as in Microfinance, Electronic Money, Social Economy, Social Money (Complementary Currencies) and Creative Economy. In 1998 she completed her Masters Degree in Law and The State and in 2011 she completed her PhD in Law, The State and The Constitution, both at the Faculty of Law, University of Brasília.  During this period, she was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (California, USA), affiliated with the Center for Latin American Studies (2001-2002), and completed an advanced course of study on Financial Law, International Economic Law and Economic Community Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Lisbon (Portugal).

At the Brazilian Central Bank she was responsible for participating, on behalf of the Legal Department of the Central Bank of Brazil, at meetings and discussions for the ratification of the Hague Convention on the Law Applicable to Certain Rights in Respect of Securities Held with an Intermediary, and for the draft of UNIDROIT Convention on Harmonized Substantive Rules Regarding Intermediated Securities, as well as on the Project to Study Social Money (Complementary/Community Currency Systems) and on the Financial Inclusion Project and the Social and Environmental Responsibility of the Financial System Project. From March 2012 to February 2013 she will be a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics where she will be based in the Legal Department researching “Smart Social Money for Inclusive and Sustainable Finance”.