Warner Bros Discovery reveals Europe, Middle East leadership team

Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has revealed the leadership team for Central Eastern Europe, Baltics, Middle East, Mediterranean and Turkey (CEE MENAT), following Jamie Cooke’s appointment as general manager of the region in June.

Priya Dogra

Current senior VP of sales for the Nordics, Benelux and Middle East, Roni Patel, will be responsible for managing content licensing for CEE MENAT and the Nordics, while Discovery’s former VP of ad sales for CEE MENAT, Andrei Grigorescu, now takes on the same role at the merged WBD company.

WarnerMedia’s sales director Cristina Valasutean will be responsible for business development and distribution in Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with Discovery’s senior business development and distribution director Francesco Perta taking on the same role for MENA and Turkey at the merged company.

Kenechi Belusevic, who was senior director of distribution and business development at Discovery, will take on the same role at the combined company for SEE (Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Slovenia and Albania), the Baltics (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania), CIS (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan), the Mediterranean (Greece, Malta and Cyprus) and Israel. She will also lead on commercial sports development across the combined region.

Jamie Cooke

Grigory Lavrov, former general manager of Media Alliance in Russia, joined WBD earlier this year where he is responsible for trade marketing across the combined region and channel management for TLC and DMAX in Turkey and Fatafeat in the Middle East.

Discovery’s senior VP of pay TV and global brands for EMEA, Lee Hobbs, will be responsible for the EMEA-wide pay TV channel business (including Discovery Channel, TLC, HGTV and ID brands) and will take on the responsibility for the new-look EMEA WBD Creative Agency servicing multiple content and channel brands.

Finally, Mabelie Bruijns has been appointed to head all communications across the combined region and pay TV networks business in EMEA for the merged company. She was previously senior director of communications for CEEMEA at Discovery.

The team is overseen by Cooke who in turn reports to new WBD EMEA (excluding Poland) president and MD Priya Dogra.