Ontier hires Bernadette Accili as tax partner in Italy and creates a new department in Rome

Ontier has incorporated Bernadette Accili as a tax partner in Italy, where she will create and lead the firm's new tax department, Cinco Dias and Iberian Lawyer report. The move turns the Rome office into a full-service operation for the firm's cross-border clients.

Accili brings more than 25 years of experience in securitisations, NPL, structured finance and tax controversy, a profile that fits the current Italian market, where the management of distressed assets and financial structuring keep generating sustained demand for specialised tax advice.

Italy, a strategic post for Spanish firms

The move consolidates a trend we have been registering: Spanish firms with an international presence no longer limit themselves to covering Italy from Madrid but equip their local offices with complete practices and market partners. Tax is, moreover, a natural bridge area between the financial and the transactional practice, so the new hire reinforces several lines of the Roman office at once.

For Ontier, creating the Italian tax department completes the offer of one of its historic seats outside Spain and allows it to compete for operations with a cross-border component where the client demands local tax execution coordinated with the Spanish or Latin American structure of the group.

The sector's tax week

Ontier's announcement closes a week of intense activity in the tax area: Toda & Nel-lo has hired Remedios García as tax partner in Madrid and KPMG Abogados has incorporated Héctor Ortega as tax director in the Canary Islands. We publish a joint analysis of the three moves and their positioning reading in our business development section.

The pattern is consistent with what has been observed in recent quarters: the external expansion of Spanish firms is now almost always executed with local market hires, as Pérez-Llorca did with Joana Mota Agostinho in Lisbon, instead of temporary postings from Spain, a more expensive formula but with much deeper client-book roots.

We will keep following the international moves of Spanish firms in major law firms.

A profile built for the Italian market

Accili's trajectory combines two specialties that in Italy walk together: financial structuring (securitisations and NPL) and tax controversy. The Italian distressed-asset market, one of Europe's most active in the last decade, generates operations where tax architecture decides the transaction's return, and that experience is precisely what a Spanish-origin firm can replicate with its habitual clients from southern Europe and Latin America with interests in Italy.

The Rome office was one of Ontier's first external bets and has served as a platform for work with Italian clients and with Spanish and Latin American groups operating in the country. With the tax area running, the seat gains autonomy to close complete operations without depending on external tax advisers, a factor financial clients especially value in operations with tight closing calendars.

Ontier maintains in Italy one of its oldest international operations, at a moment when several Spanish firms are reordering their external map after the expansion years. The incorporation of an own tax team in Rome closes a gap that until now forced that part of the work to be referred out, and fits the firm's strategy of growing in complete cross-border services for SMEs and family groups, its historic client core, instead of competing for the big mandates concentrated in international firms.

Source: Cinco Dias and Iberian Lawyer. This piece is informative and does not constitute legal advice.