When GBM meets Italy
by Consolato Gattuso
Since 2019, our firm has an exclusive partnership with the Italian law firm, Societa di Consulenza, Legal Network (“SCLN”). SCLN is a law firm based in Rome with offices in Milan and Catanzaro. It is very similar to GBM in terms of size and areas of law including corporate, commercial, banking, and tax law.
The initial purpose of our partnership was to provide Italian business enterprises with the services required to do business in Canada and the United States and similarly with Canadian companies wishing to do business in Europe. These services provided included taxation, immigration, corporate, real estate, and financing. SCLN and GBM have worked together to promote our services with regional Italian governments having collaborated and organized several trade shows, conferences, and symposiums. The Quebec Delegation of Trade in Rome and the Italian Chamber of Commerce (“ICC”) contributed to the success of these events. In fact, we signed a memorandum of understanding with the ICC allowing our clients access to feasibility studies, business plans, grants, etc. Moreover, SCLN and GBM have created a Canadian corporation, Italy2Canada Inc. (“I2C”) to provide said services to our clients. As I2C started to experience phenomenal success, the pandemic hit worldwide and hampered our progress. All international and regional travel was restricted and, as a result, the Italian government agency Simest SPA, which supports Italian companies expanding abroad, closed its assistance programs. However, since the end of the pandemic, we have seen renewed interest in this area, and Simest has once again relaunched its assistance programs for Italian companies.
Although the pandemic created certain obstacles, newly found opportunities appeared.
The pandemic has caused a veritable disruption in the economic and legal world, allowing certain more specific and restricted areas of activity to grow in importance, such as the area of succession law. With as many people of Italian origin living outside of Italy as within, it is undoubtedly an area of growth. Our Canadian clients having succession issues in Italy have grown to the point where one of our Italian partners is working full-time on these types of mandates. With this success resulting only from word of mouth, GBM and SCLN have decided to create an online platform addressing succession issues in Italy marketed to Canadians, Americans, and South Americans. A call center for information is presently being established in Rome which will be operated by Italian lawyers. These lawyers will analyze the facts with the callers and discuss the necessary steps required to recognize the will and testament in Italy and will propose different packages depending on the type of services required. We have already concluded agreements with Italian translators and are concluding working relationships with the various Italian consulates and embassies in Canada and the United States. We have entered into a working relationship with two New York-based law firms and also have access to every major city in the United States through our association with NIABA, an Italian American law society. Online platform services will include translation, legalization, and homologation of foreign wills in Italy as well as litigation and real estate services. We are scheduling a first-quarter 2024 launch date.
Another area that has also experienced a significant increase in the demand is for Italian citizenships. We are constantly being solicited by clients who want their Italian citizenship. Moreover, there are lawyers in the US whose practice is dedicated exclusively to obtaining Italian citizenship for their clients. As a result, SCLN and our firm will be creating a second online platform dedicated to the obtention of Italian citizenship. We are working concurrently with the professionals building the successions platform in Italy. The Citizenship platform will be similar to the succession platform with a call center managed by Italian lawyers in Rome. Our services will include obtaining citizenship either by the consulates, embassies, or the Italian courts, obtaining tax numbers, purchasing properties in Italy, and legal requirements to live in Italy.
Over the years, our partnership with SCLN has provided GBM opportunities to deal with several types of mandates from determining the tax consequences of an Italian soccer player who played for the Montreal Impact, to the evaluation and negotiation of several important office buildings and residential towers in Montreal and Calgary, to collection matters for BNP, an Italian based bank, a client of our respective firms.
We are at the nascent stages of these exciting projects and we are confident of their imminent success.
