…is not what the 73 GGI members answered when being asked what they thought about this event. On the contrary, there was an abundance of excellent food at the traditional ITPG winter meeting, which took place on a sunny March weekend in the Grand Visconti Palace Hotel in Milan. In addition, all who attended the highly skilled technical presentations enjoyed themselves immensely. Dr. Sergio Finulli, Avv. Mariagiulia Signori and Dr. Simona Cucchi from the Milan-based host firm Comma 10 organised a wonderful program for the participants. As special highlights and first-time events in an ITPG meeting, activities included skiing, filming and a carnival party in fancy dress costume.
On Thursday, six participants drove from Milan to St. Moritz in Switzerland and enjoyed a wonderful sunny skiing day, which happily did not result in any broken arms or legs.
On Friday and Saturday, Serban Beldie, a filmmaker from Romania, shot individual corporate movies for six GGI members, who had agreed to undertake this project beforehand. ITPG VC Ionut Zeche had arranged for the filmmaker to come to Milan and had booked an executive suite for the shooting. Filming was also carried out during the technical sessions and breaks.
On Friday afternoon, the technical sessions kicked off with three tax-related PG meetings. Raluca Tutu chaired the ITPG sub-group Indirect Taxes, Professor Robert Anthony hosted a brainstorming session for his case study 2014 of “a lucky life” in the Private Equity and International Wealth Management PG and Ionut Zeche chaired the Immigration & Expatriate Services PG. In the evening, all participants and accompanying persons gathered for a delicious seafood dinner in La Bisboccia Ristorante.
The ITPG meeting took place for the whole of Saturday. Oliver Biernat began the meeting with a panel discussion on “voluntary disclosure of tax evasion”, including a comparison of the jurisdictions of seven countries, each represented by GGI members. Arlene Rochlin from the International Dispute Resolution PG talked about “Get Talking!! Attorney + Accountant = Accord + MONEY!”.
After lunch, Graham Busch offered an interesting panel discussion on the latest developments of Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) and the OECD with participants from five different countries. Jenny Panou presented a topic unknown to many tax experts: “Greek service centres – interesting for multinational groups?” and Ashish Bairagra talked on “Transfer pricing pitfalls in the initial years of incorporation”. In order to hold the attention of the participants, Oliver showed a selection of his comedy short films between the different sessions.
The middle section of the meeting featured some slides that showed the development of the ITPG since Oliver Biernat took over as chairman in 2008. Following the Milan event, the ITPG has 64 regular members and 369 visiting members. After looking at various tax databases and tax planning software, a discussion took place on a better name for “regular member” and on the venue of the ITPG winter meeting 2015. It was also decided that an ITPG FYI newsletter would be started in 2014.
Finally, GGI President Claudio Cocca held elections and Oliver Biernat was re-elected as Global Chairman of the ITPG and Graham Busch and Ionut Zeche were again appointed as Global Vice Chairmen.
On Saturday evening, all participants were encouraged to dress in a way that would be considered absolutely ridiculous at the office. Following by dinner at Spazio QC Terme Milano, they proceeded to attend a spectacular carnival party where fancy dress was obligatory.
Between the various courses of delicious food, the mind reader Federico Soldati from Switzerland, http://www.federicosoldati.com/, gave a terrific show, which fascinated the participants. He managed to solve a Rubik’s cube in not just less than 25 seconds, but also blindfolded. He was also able to find out two or three digit numbers various participants had thought of during the show and informed the room that the name of the first boy Julie Bryant had kissed was Tim.
After dinner, the party continued with live music and dancing, which continued long into the night past midnight. As usual, this was not the end for some very active attendees. It was reported that some people shocked the night-time taxi drivers in Milan with their strange outfits. When they struggled to find a bar that was open, they bought some beer and returned to the conference hotel, sitting in the lobby as the hotel bar was also closed. It came as a complete surprise to them when a group of other GGI members joined them at around 3 a.m. reporting that they had been the last guests in a bar a mere 100 metres from the hotel.
GGI member firm
Benefitax GmbH, Steuerberatungsgesellschaft, Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft
Auditing & Accounting, Tax, Advisory, Corporate Finance, Fiduciary & Estate Planning
Frankfurt / Main, Germany
Oliver Biernat
E: o.biernat@benefitax.de
W: http://www.benefitax.de
GGI | Geneva Group International 