About

Patrizia Carrozza is general counsel of SAES Getters, an Italian joint stock company listed on the STAR Italian Stock Exchange Market valued at €200m and manages a team of four lawyers. Her team is responsible for the legal matters of the entire company across and in its locations in the US, South Korea, Japan and China. Carrozza leads the team and manages the corporate secretary office serving as corporate liaison with the authorities (Consob and Borsa Italiana), ensuring corporate compliance with stock market requirements including preparing or overseeing ordinary and extraordinary documents and reports. She advises the company on the management of its corporate governance such as adherence to the Market Abuse Directive, compliance in general, internal dealing and the insiders register. She oversees all contractual matter including, but not limited to, in-house drafting in English and Italian of standard or tailor-made agreements such as sales representative, distribution, supply, rent and lease agreements, research and development, patents and licensing. Carrozza is also in charge of M&A activity, stock purchase agreements, public offerings, share conversion and is the team leader on all acquisitions. On the success thus far in her career and her management approach, Carrozza says that the diversity of her experience has been critical. She says that she has ‘had the privilege to have been exposed to different environments, mind sets and organisations, combining both the headquarters decision taking point of view and the subsidiary one where the ability to buy in and escalate many decision making steps is essential. [I have] been given the opportunity to reshape legal departments adjusting to then current needs, both for cost cutting and – luckily – for building up a team from scratch sized with the group’s needs’. SAES Getters recently entered into a very complex M&A transaction to divest a business for US$355m (subject to adjustment), involving different jurisdictions, which is a notable breakthrough for the group. In 2016 it internally managed an acquisition on the Italian market, which was key to enter a new market. From 2017, Carrozza set up the compliance function and the team handled a number of in-house challenges around enterprise risk management, data protection, 231 Model, business continuity, and whistleblowing integrating new processes in the group, working heavily on changing some cultural legacies of the past and establishing new policies.