Giuseppe Abatista is a manager, with skills in international, European and Italian tax law, customs regulations, legal tax and accounting aspects of M&A, commercial contracts, pricing, planning & control and corporate finance. He is a lawyer and graduated with honours from the Executive Masters in Finance at SDA Bocconi management school.
He started his career as a tax litigation lawyer, then moved to the Tax department of Chiomenti law firm, specialising in M&A, private equity, real estate transactions and taxation of income from capital. He then worked as Tax manager of De Agostini Group’s headquarters, dealing with M&A, tax planning and reorganisations, tax litigation and transfer pricing for more than 400 companies spread all over the world.
In 2011 he started the tax department in Salvatore Ferragamo Group, managing the tax related aspects of the IPO process and the more relevant tax issues for all the Group’s subsidiaries in 4 continents. He also manages customs audits and procedures and obtained for the HQ the AEO Full Status in 2016. He negotiated and executed with the Italian tax authorities the advanced ruling on the Italian Patent Box regime (2016), an APA involving transactions towards 15 countries (2017) and an advance ruling on tax incentives for new investments with Italian tax authorities (2017). He has been negotiating a bilateral APA between Italy and USA since 2018.
In 2018 he became responsible for the Group Planning and Control department as well, managing pricing, stores network planning, financial planning, reporting and industrial costing.
He has been for 3 years an independent director in the board of Banca Popolare di Puglia e Basilicata, which stills advises on strategy, tax and retail transformation within the Advisory Board.
He co-started and co-coordinates the Tax Affairs Committee of Fondazione Altagamma, the association of Italian luxury enterprises. He was a member of the VAT Expert Group during its first term, advising the European Commission on VAT legislation. He usually represents the luxury sector vis-à-vis Italian, European and international institutions, including the OECD.
He lectures and joins panels in Italian and international masters, conventions and workshops, on a wide range of subjects going from VAT to transfer pricing, from cross-border structuring to tax audits, from customs regulations to strategy and corporate finance.