Partner Perspectives: Roman Bradu

In your opinion, what personality traits a lawyer should have today? In other words, other than their legal knowledge, what makes a good lawyer?

You know oftentimes your clients matter, company, business or even life, is a stake. While as a lawyer, you can hold their destiny and course of life in your hands. Such owner comes with great responsibility though. Thus just great knowledge of law will never be enough.

A lawyer’s character and work outcome will be greatly influenced by how reliable and available his to its client’s needs. The client must know that their lawyer is trustworthy, reliable, and that they show interest and they play an active role throughout the client’s business journey.

How is the current energy crisis affecting your field of expertise, and how it is affecting the legal industry in general?

The current energy crisis was a sort of the big bang of emergency measures taking on both European national levels implemented with the purpose of helping the state ultimately help the final consumers on the top of everything.

The conflict started right near our borders, led to amplifying the crisis by cutting and important energy supply from the European market. All the new emergency measure measures as well as the sanctions imposed on Russian crude oil and petroleum created an environment where companies were more prone to tax or maybe even criminal consequences.

Last, the newly introduced solidarity contribution, which will soon be due in June, and it’s affecting most of all the manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers around Europe. This contribution was, originally introduced by the European Union with member states being able to provide their own provisions. In implementing this suggested measures, most energy companies operate in more than one country, raising many issues regarding national provisions applicability.

Some companies pay the same contribution in more countries, while some manage to allude the contribution due to the v and uncorrelated regulations on the in the member states. However, due to this provisions being both new and exceptional, the tax authorities are larking on companies like hoax. Therefore, the companies who are subject to this contribution are exposed to possible recalculations of income and corporate takes possibly escalating to tax evasion.

The business environment currently and has a precarious state caused by energy crisis. The uncertainty of the evolution within the energy crisis and the supply demand balance, a lawyer’s contribution in the current crisis and on legal grounds of the imposed emergency measures has proven to be absolutely vital towards creating a bulletproof evolution for companies that carry out activities in energy sectors.

In the current business context, companies need to optimise their cost and improve their energy footprint. Consequently, how would you advise them to choose their energy supply source?

Although our markets are still mostly populated with the energy manufactured from crude oil and gas, I do believe the current environment made an even stronger push towards more investment in renewable energy. Companies are now focusing on creating sustainable workplaces using better types of equipment to ensure less pollution, as well as investing in the optimization of factories and final products. Well, within this framework, I believe the next big thing in the energy sector is to rely on hydrogen as a new type of energy.

But this is more probably speaks to the future, given that currently elemental hydrogen is scarce and its production is not as environmentally friendly as we’d expected being counterbalanced by the emissions of the carbon dioxide. Nonetheless, the energy sector has proven to us time and time it’s engineering. Therefore, we are all holding our breath for the next big thing to improve our day-to-day life.

Would you say that this market environment favourable to companies that are still reliant on fossil fuels?

You see although the price has increased and the market has suffered for the final consumer to say that the market environment was favourable for the company’s reliant of fossil fuels would be an understatement due to the final prices, increase the manufacturing margin as well as the retail profits skyrocketed in 2022 for both manufacturing refineries and final retailers.

Even though the energy crisis created grounds for a tougher market, our energy sector players have managed to find the light at the end of the tunnel and survive the predicted market brush. Some even with amazing profits.

Finally, what advice do you wish a senior partner gave you when you started your career?

I’ve gotten myself for my career on what my mentor once told me regarding the three essential qualities an exceptional lawyer must possess, and that would be knowledge, talent, and commitment. As he once explained to me, all three must coexist in order to create the perfect synergy in this world.

If you lack a certain spark of the talent and knowledge, you can still always succeed to a certain extent if you’re committed, determined, and disciplined. However, if you’re not committed to the cause, you could have all the talents and knowledge in this world, and they still won’t do any good for you. And this, I believe, applies to any profession.