About

Led by the notable group general counsel Claudio Criscuolo, the Cementir Group legal function is a 15-member team, located at the Rome headquarters as well as abroad in Cementir affiliates worldwide. Criscuolo is known for complex transaction management, and the lean Six Sigma methodology in the management of legal expenses, team leadership and persuasive negotiation skill. He has specialised in international deals, both at industrial and financial level, for which he has received multiple awards. Cementir is an international player with roots well planted in Italy, Criscuolo admits that operating in the jurisdiction can be challenging: ‘The difficulties experienced by the country, along with the peculiar conditions of the Italian cement market (more than halved compared with recent peak years) have largely outnumbered any other factor affecting our activity as legal department in the latest period’. Nevertheless, the team has been involved in a number of M&A deals, domestic cross-borders and in all negotiations of a large-scale related acquisition financing, ‘worth well in excess of the market capitalization of the entire Cementir group’. Criscuolo adds that all members of the team has worked on extraordinary transactions and have developed a unique ability to manage in parallel a few of these exercises at the same time. The team has spearheaded a full integration between corporate and regional levels, which was achieved by sharing in the same processes and procedures, tools and ways of working. ‘We act as one, fully centralised legal department through people who as if just by accident happen to be deployed in different geographies. This allows us to provide a consistent level of legal services across the board and manage very complex assignments in the limited time usually afforded. This proves absolutely critical when it comes down to M&A deals and related arrangements and allows us to be in full control of legal expenses, with a limited recourse to external counsels’. Talking about the legal functions’ ethos, Criscuolo says when it comes down to legal services, it is all about the association between quality and rapidity in responding to internal clients’ needs and possibly anticipating them. ‘We strongly believe each of these two qualities is worthless without the other. As a legal department, we have developed an expertise within our industry, particularly in the field of M&A deals, which is unique and makes us real business partners. We deliver what we promise and we do it very fast. Our track records in domestic and cross-border acquisitions shows how much working together in parallel and trusting each other have gained our Group a competitive advantages over apparently bigger competitors of ours, in auctions and other competitive bids’.