About

The Italian business of the American photovoltaic cells manufacturer SunPower is the most profitable subsidiary of the company outside the US. An Italian lawyer with regional responsibilities across several countries in Europe and Asia, Antonio Adami has had the chance to participate in the negotiations for the first major solar park built in Italy and among the largest in the world. A project of such scale and complexity unsurprisingly raised great expectations from investors, but these were met both commercially and legally. ‘Needless to say the pressure on our team was huge’, Adami says. Establishing the legal department from scratch has been one of the other highlights of Adami’s career. He had to start-up a legal department in parallel with the start-up of a subsidiary (growing from zero revenue to €500m turnover) in a completely brand new industry in Italy. This meant establishing new practices from contract templates, to creating compliance procedures and ensuring that this did not imply a duplication of efforts with the compliance programs at headquarters. Subsequently, Adami has worked on ensuring market entry for SunPower into new countries and has also made notable operational improvements to the legal department. These include: implementation of a fully-fledged software tool for in-depth monitoring of legal expenses, set-up of procedures for internal legal assistance and set-up of a quality policy of internal legal services. In addition, over the past years, Adami has impressed with his provision of exceptional legal advice to the construction and (in some cases) financing of up to 180MW of installed capacity of solar parks across Europe and Australia.