AmCham Vietnam
Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Committee

Co-Chair

Gregory Testerman, CEO, Testerman Advisory, LLC

Greg’s thirty-year career in international Corporate & Investment Banking spans four continents and all of the world’s major banking centers and capital markets. After training at JP Morgan Chase’s New York headquarters and in Europe, he worked seventeen years with Banco Santander throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America, including as Chief Executive and Country Manager of Santander’s bank in Japan – with responsibility for Southeast Asian markets – and Chief Executive for Santander’s Miami branch, responsible for correspondent banking, trade finance, and structured trade throughout Latin America. He spent nine years as Treasurer and Senior Managing Director of Capital Markets for the Foreign Trade Bank of Latin America (“Bladex”), a supranational development bank. Throughout his banking career, Greg has specialized in building new businesses, and turning around challenged ones.

Co-Chair

Hien Vuong, LEED AP BD+C, Design & Sustainability Manager, EZ Land

Ms. Hien Minh Vuong has a long-time passion for building sustainable communities. As a financial analyst in Washington DC, Hien specialized in project financing in developing countries such as woman health clinic and dairy farms. As an architect in California, she worked with the top sustainable architecture and engineering firms to design school, universities, and community centers. With a unique background in both project finance and sustainable design, she came back to Vietnam in late 2019 to explore sustainable housing development for the Vietnamese middle class. Currently, she is leading the efforts at the Vietnam-based real estate developer EZLand to ensure their development projects more environmentally friendly, their apartments healthier for its occupants, and the company’s operation better compliant with ESG (environment-social-governance) benchmarks. As a Co-chair of the ESG committee of Amcham, she is looking forward to facilitating the conversation and implementation of ESG measures among the business community here in Vietnam.

Vice Chair

Paola Romero-Crespo, Capital Projects & Sustainable Finance Lead, ERM Vietnam

Ms. Romero is the CDP Partner Lead at ERM Vietnam. She has over 25 years of experience in delivering environmental and social impact assessments. Ms. Romero has extensive experience in preparing impact assessments that cove the full lifecycle of projects. She has experience as well in working with international sustainable IFC standards, EP4, OECD Guidelines and ADB Safeguard Policy Statements for Multinational Enterprises. She is well versed in the current regulatory framework of environmental, health and safety, and hazardous waste regulations in several international contexts including Vietnam. She has been responsible for directing projects and obtaining the relevant authorizations for EIAs and Social Impact assessments. She has participated in more than 500 EIAs for industrial sectors including power (solar), manufacturing, chemical, petrochemical and mining. In addition, she has led more than 300 compliance audits and Phase 1 Due Diligence assessments and more than 50 ESHIA financial due diligence assessments against international IFC standards.  Ms. Romero has participated in projects linked with diverse financing institution and international banks such as Actis, Macquarie, Alsis Funds, Mizuho, ING, KfW, Proparco, IFC, WB, Credit Agricole, Banobras, BancoMext, FMO, among others.

Vice Chair

Van Ly, Corporate Sustainability and NGO Consultant

Van is a partner at Raise Partners, a new collaborative consulting practice bringing together expertise to share with organizations that contribute to the betterment of humanity. She has 20 years of experience working in both the private sector in branding and communications and the nonprofit sector in fundraising, communications, and program management.  In particular, she has extensive experience in nonprofit fundraising and program strategy, strategic marketing and communications planning and delivery, grant writing, corporate social responsibility and citizenship, and donor and stakeholder engagement.

Van has a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from American University in Washington D.C.

Secretary

Marcus Giles, Director of Business Development, CME Solar Investments

Marcus is currently Director of Business Development for CME Solar Investments, a leading investor in renewable energy projects backed by Vietnam Oman Investment fund (VOI). With CME, his goal is to provide companies with 100% renewable energy at the lowest available cost to incentivize progress towards 2030 Paris Agreement climate goals. Marcus’ diverse career includes over 20 years in senior management roles with Digital Media, Marketing & Advertising functions across APAC and European markets at companies such as Ernst & Young, Telstra and IMG. Marcus also offers consultancy services aimed at assisting renewable energy businesses to develop effective and efficient digital marketing and operational platforms. CME currently operates solar farms producing 140MWp, has numerous commercial and industrial distributed energy projects, as well as wind farms under development that are projected to produce 250MWp.

Legal Advisor

Stephen Le Hoang Chuong, Founder, Le & Tran

Stephen Le, is the lead Trial Lawyer and founder of Le & Tran. He has been endorsed as one of the most distinguished Vietnamese lawyers by over 50 global corporations and is highly ranked by Legal 500, Chambers Asia Pacific, Benchmark Litigation, and AsiaLaw Profiles.

Board Liaisons

Kevin J. Moore, Managing Director, Vietnam Waste Solutions

Kevin Moore has been the Managing Director for Vietnam Waste Solutions (VWS) since 2006. Prior to that he worked as a private consultant for Veolia Environmental Services/Onyx in Hong Kong for six years. In the twelve years preceding that, Kevin worked at Waste Management Inc., in California. Previous employment included seven years at PSE&G in New Jersey. Kevin has previously served on the AmCham Vietnam Board of Governors.

VWS is a subsidiary of California Waste Solutions, a private firm with recycling operations in Oakland and San Jose, California. His position here in HCMC requires direct interaction with HCMC leaders and Departments as well as various Ministries in Hanoi. VWS represents the first privatization of a public service enterprise and one of the larger environmental service investments into Vietnam. This investment project is valued at over USD $150 million and is on a fifty year contract with the People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City, aiming to effectively manage waste delivered by the City to the Da Phuoc Waste Management Facility. VWS is expanding their services with a new project in Long An province that will move beyond landfilling to waste transformation, developing “waste to energy” and “waste to feedstock” solutions.

Board Liaisons

Kasia Weina, Co-Founder, Director, Evergreen Labs

Dr. Kasia Weina has extensive experience and education in research and project management. She has a bachelor’s in biology and chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MS in pharmaceutical drug discovery from the University College London, and a PhD in Molecular Biology (cancer and stem cell research) from the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Kasia has worked in laboratories in different countries, including the Great Lakes Water Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison (NIH), a biotech firm in the Cambridge area, and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. After her PhD and a Postdoc period, she pivoted her career to sustainable development and social entrepreneurship in Asia and frontier markets. In 2015 she co-founded her first startup focused on designing and producing eco-friendly products in Hong Kong, before moving to Vietnam in early 2016 to co-found Evergreen Labs.

As the director of Evergreen Labs (a solution-driven social and environmental project, development organization, and social venture builder), Kasia oversees daily operations, including idea validation and innovation and technology within the experimentation branch, while applying a scientific approach to sustainable business development. In the past five years, she has co-developed two social business spinoffs and grown the advisory branch. To date, Evergreen Labs has worked and scaled innovations in Vietnam, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Indonesia, and Thailand. Kasia focuses on: solid waste management, agriculture value chain, and sustainability management. She has managed projects for a variety of notable clients including ADB, MBI, IDH, GIZ and IUCN.

Kasia has published 10 papers in international journals, co-authored work with UNDP, and has been featured in South China Morning Post. In 2020 she received the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Graduate of the Last Decade Award. Kasia still supports labs in Germany with research paper publications in peer-reviewed journals and has supported research projects at VN-UK University of Danang, Vietnam.