What can be a strategic vision for EU finance and industry moving forward? In this episode of the Liberal Europe […]
What can be a strategic vision for EU finance and industry moving forward?
In this episode of the Liberal Europe Podcast, Ricardo Silvestre (Movimento Liberal Social), welcomes (back) Marco Cecchi de’Rossi, and also Marianna Vintiadis and Filippo De Nicola, for a panel discussion on what the stress points are, but also the opportunities, for better decision processes in the European Union.
Marianna is Partner for Forensic Investigations & Intelligence at RSM Italy and CEO of RSM Corporate Finance, Filippo is and M&A Strategy for Aerospace & Defense at Silicon Mountain, and Marco Cecchi de’Rossi is an investment committee member at Arpinge SpA and board member at SIDAM.
This podcast, as well as previous episodes, is available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcast, Stitcher and Spotify.
This conversation was recorded during the event ‘Governance without Goals? Restoring Strategic Vision in European Finance and Industry’, organised by the Adam Smith Society in Milan.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
Ricardo: Welcome to the Liberal Europe podcast. I’m your host, Ricardo Silvestre. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Our constant listeners noticed that we had two episodes recorded live in Milan during an event called “Governance Without Goals: Restoring Strategic Vision in European Finance and Industry,” organised by our friends from the Adam Smith Society, now a full member of the ELF network. Those were the conversations with Marco Cecchi de Rossi, where we talked about European Union economic integration, and with Annarita Morelli, where we talked about European finance. After those two conversations, we had a panel discussion where we were joined by Marianna Vintiadis and Filippo De Nicola, and we talked about stress points but also opportunities for better decision processes in the European Union. Marianna is Equity Partner at RSM S.p.A., CEO of RSM Italy Corporate Finance, and Head of Forensic Investigations & Intelligence at RSM Italy. Filippo is M&A Strategy for Aerospace and Defence at Silicon Mountain. I want to take the opportunity to thank the team at Adam Smith Society, and I’m looking forward to bringing you more conversations recorded in events from our friends in Milan. But now, without further ado, it’s my pleasure to bring you a panel discussion about Governance Without Goals: Restoring Strategic Vision in European Finance and Industry.
Ricardo: It’s my pleasure now to have Marianna Vintiadis and Filippo De Nicola. Let’s start with Marianna. She’s a Corporate Intelligence Expert and Equity Partner at RSM, and also serves on the board of directors of Adam Smith Society. Marianna, what was the path you took?
Marianna: A world of corporate intelligence and investigations, which is a very interesting perspective through which to look at the world. I worked in that capacity within a very large American firm — Kroll. So I was a manager, if you want, in an international establishment. And then I became a start-up: I set up a technology start-up, which was later bought by RSM. And we can talk about that if you want — and finance. But that’s been my career. All my life, I’ve been dealing with the same kinds of areas. I was working on trust in Cambridge, so I’ll be talking about trust today as well. This has been a key line across my thinking throughout the years, even though it’s been applied in different scenarios and different capacities.
Ricardo: Marianna, let’s get into it. Europe is often described as thorough but slow. Being in Brussels, one of the complaints we always hear is that we need more speed, we need more agility. Tell us: how can the European Union redesign its decision-making process so that we can reconcile democratic legitimacy with strategic speed?
Marianna: The way I see it, Europe’s decision-making cannot really be understood without starting from a simple fact. There are 27 democracies. Different economic structures, political priorities, and strategic cultures change from country to country. Formally, all of them have equal rights within the Union. I don’t think this pluralism is a defect. I think it’s the essence of the European project, and I wouldn’t like to see that change in any way. But it does make strategic alignment more demanding. So the real challenge is not how to move faster by reducing democratic safeguards, but how to organise coordination more intelligently within the fact that we are a very diverse group of countries. One key issue for me is prioritisation. When 27 national perspectives enter a negotiation space, everything tends to become important. Strategic speed requires clearer sequencing, stronger political discipline at the European level — not fewer voices, but clearer direction. Too often, alignment between member states happens late in the process, once positions are already politically charged. Earlier coordination, both among governments and between institutional stakeholders, could prevent months of negotiations later. Anticipation of what is likely to come is a form of efficiency. The most underestimated of these challenges is implementation. Even when agreement is reached within the EU, interpretation and enforcement can diverge significantly across member states. Different administrative traditions, supervisory cultures, and political sensitivities lead to fragmentation inside the market. And for businesses, especially SMEs — which are so important to the European economy — this is where a lot of competitiveness is lost. Not in the parliamentary debate, not in what happens in the politics in Brussels, which often gets accused and bears the brunt of dissatisfaction, but in inconsistent application. If compliance in one member state does not translate into operational certainty in another, then scalability becomes a problem. Addressing this does not require centralising everything in Brussels. It requires stronger coordination mechanisms, clearer drafting, more harmonised guidance, closer cooperation between supervisory authorities, and greater transparency in how the rules are interpreted. Predictability translates in time into trust. And trust is what would allow the 27 systems to function better as one market. In a geopolitical environment where others may act unilaterally, Europe’s strength will never be in uniformity. It will be in coherence — the ability to align diversity around common objectives and progress consistently. If we improve alignment early, prioritise more clearly, and reduce divergence in implementation, we can gain strategic effectiveness without compromising democratic legitimacy. And in Europe’s case, legitimacy is not a constraint on competitiveness. It is a foundation stone.
Ricardo: This connects to something I’m very interested in. We’re doing some work with what is a little bit of a political revolution when we’re talking about implementing the Draghi Report. And you just made the argument for Mr. Draghi in a way. So what is your position when we have this discourse happening at the same time — the need to have a coalition of willing countries that can harmonise more easily? This concept of pragmatic federalism — what does it mean to you against the vision you just expressed?
Marianna: One of the things we need to understand is the way dialogue takes place. If you want to change the system, if you want to move towards a strategic vision, the lack of dialogue is not our problem. We have all sorts of consultations, groups, stakeholder meetings, public feedback mechanisms. The architecture for participation is there. The real question is different: is the dialogue strategic enough for the geopolitical moment we’re living in? Too often, engagement between institutions and industry feels procedural. A proposal is published, positions are formed, comments are submitted, amendments negotiated — the whole rigmarole — and then we move on to the next rule. What is harder to see, and sometimes missing, is that you need a strategic conversation across the whole picture: where are we going? And then we go backwards into what are the rules and legislation we need to implement. Not the other way around, where we start by saying, okay, we have a calendar of directives and we open and close a chapter on each of them. Industrial policy, financial architecture, investment, and regulation should all fit together in an idea of where we need to be getting to over time. Competitiveness is not built one directive at a time. It’s built through coherence. When dialogue becomes file-by-file, three things tend to happen. We optimise individual pieces of legislation without optimising the overall system. Engagement happens after political direction has already been set — coalitions have already formed, the matter has become politicised. By the time industry can contribute, everyone has already taken their positions. And the third point, which as a liberal matters a lot to me — going back to my trust argument — trust is eroded in this way. Even when procedures are formally transparent, stakeholders can feel that consultation is just something they need to do to comply. It’s part of a system. This is the consultation phase; we’ve done it; we move on to the next. We need to understand that trust is not a decorative element of economic governance. It’s operational. It reduces resistance, increases predictability, and ultimately encourages investment. Perhaps the shift we need is not more dialogue, but earlier and more structured dialogue. A conversation that begins at the agenda-setting stage, not the drafting stage. Grounded in evidence — cost curves, implementation capacity, risk assessment, future economic impact — rather than positioning. And a conversation that remains transparent. Market actors and public institutions are not adversaries — I’m an old-fashioned liberal in this. They are co-architects of the framework within which growth happens. In a volatile global environment, Europe’s competitive edge comes not from cutting corners on governance, but from improving the quality of dialogue: making it more coherent, more predictable, and more trusted.
Ricardo: Now I want to bring Filippo De Nicola into the conversation. Filippo is M&A Strategy Director at Silicon Mountain, helping build an aerospace and defence industrial platform. He previously researched shareholder activism and corporate governance at CBA Studio Legale e Tributario. Filippo, the same question — in one minute, tell us how this interest of yours led to a point where you’re now making decisions regarding our safety and defence in Europe.
Filippo: I wish. First of all, thanks for having me on the panel, Ricardo. Long story short, I happened to be in defence. A friend of mine was offered a position that he thought was crazy to do alone. And that was the current position I hold — because we’re working with this manufacturing group in the Northern Piedmont region in Italy. He asked me one night out of nowhere if I wanted to join him and leave my job. One of those proposals you can’t refuse. We both thought that doing that, instead of having a consulting company doing what we’re doing now, would have been crazy. But we both loved the idea. So we studied the possible outcomes of what we were doing and proposed a strategy to the private equity fund that owns the group we are now working for, and to the management of the group. They liked it. Over weekends and almost three months, we crafted this strategy. After they decided it was worth it, we jumped right on it.
Ricardo: You’re also on this panel for a much-needed perspective of a young entrepreneur. So let me get into the question I had for you: naturally, there’s competition between the US, China, and Europe. But for you, how much are competitors challenged by internal fragmentation? And what do you think are some institutional mechanisms that could better ensure coherence across member states? Simplification and coherence — those are themes we’ve been discussing around this panel.
Filippo: I think the majority of our problems come from the most perilous enemy of the EU, which is the EU — not China or the US. We already have a very strong background in manufacturing, and we would have nice legislation if there weren’t 27 different ones that we all have to adhere to. I can talk a bit more for the defence side, because that’s where I’m specialised right now. Already, the procurement for defence is extremely complicated because of this. To jump on what Marianna said before, and what Annarita mentioned about transparency and trust: one major breaking point for defence procurement in the EU is Article 346 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which basically says that countries need to do procurement within the EU, but with special legislations for the nations. In 2009 we tried, with the Defence Procurement Directive, to make it more collaborative — but that proved completely ineffective. Still, only 18% of defence procurement in the EU is actually done collaboratively. That’s well below the standard that even the EDA proposed in 2005, which was 35%. It’s extremely difficult to work when a legislative framework is already working against the very thing that would make you more effective. Then I could speak about how we have 178 major weapon systems in the EU that are done differently, manufactured differently. The US has 30, even though they produce and manufacture way more, and way better. We have more than a dozen different battle tanks. The US has one. We have 20 different fighter jets, and mostly they’re from the US, actually — not from the EU. So there’s a very difficult process we need to endure in order to have a more competitive and straight-line procurement. My experience talking with institutions, corporations, scale-ups, and start-ups has been completely different depending on which. Institutions are usually very prudent and risk-averse to a level that one hardly understands. Corporations are now starting to see that taking risks can be rewarding. Working with Leonardo, Fincantieri, Thales, and the primes in the defence industry — they are investing not only in their corporate structure but also monetarily into innovation, and actually having better procurement and a better supply chain. Scale-ups and start-ups, instead, are finding many difficulties in having access to the procurement agencies and the institutions. So there is this disconnect. Therefore, what most entrepreneurs are trying to do is build an ecosystem from the ground up instead of waiting for someone to do it top-down. Because we’ve heard politicians from France, Germany, Italy stating that we need a stronger European Union, we need to do things all together — but then, for air combat, if Safran doesn’t decide or Dassault doesn’t decide, we don’t do anything for the ground systems. If Rheinmetall doesn’t have the last word, then it’s impossible to do anything else. So waiting for politics to give us the purpose and the adherence to European principles, I think, is going to be a long way. What entrepreneurs are trying to do is adopt more of a US-style ecosystem, starting from the bottom up.
Ricardo: Very good, thank you so much for giving us that perspective of a young entrepreneur in the European Union, and how to navigate these needs and obstacles. I want to bring Marco Cecchi de Rossi back into the conversation because I want you to react to what Marianna presented to us. What is the resistance? Is it because it’s the way it’s always been done, or because politicians don’t want to take the risks of having more trust and more transparency? Tell us your analysis of what Marianna was telling us.
Marco: We should start from the fact that politicians at the European level are elected in a separate, different system from local and national parliaments. And — I know it’s trivial, everybody knows this — but the European Commission is not even elected. It is elected by the European Parliament. So there is a fracture between the Commission level and the voter. This is something you cannot solve in one year, in ten years — I don’t know. I cannot imagine a political conflict resolution between who decides what and who is sovereign, in a continent that has emerged from war only 70 years ago. Comparatively, the US emerged now 120 years after its civil war. So when we speak about one system in the US, one in Europe, one might consider this simple but extremely heavy historical fact: we were in a civil war only 70 years ago in Europe. Every time you read now that Germany is going to step up its defence, you will always find in any country in Europe some newspaper — I don’t talk about social media, but newspapers — asking, “Should we fear Germany becoming armed again?” This is something you cannot avoid. That’s why I think the approach to be pragmatic and gradual is unavoidable. There is no other solution. We cannot do in one year what has been done in the US in 50 years, even if the systems are overall similar. People vote, governments change. So in spite of all the hate that emerges here and there, we are still in 27, 28, 30 countries — more than that — in a situation where you can change a government, and there won’t be a coup d’état for it. Taking that into account: professionally, I have a long-term view. In this case I try to see what my grandchildren, who are now in their late teens, will see. They will see a different Europe from what I see — probably simpler, certainly with a larger defence capability, less dependent on China for some materials, maybe more proactive in exploring Greenland’s resources and African resources. We should never forget that we are much closer to Africa as a whole — not only the northern part, but all of Africa — than any other big power in the world.
Ricardo: Marianna, again — what is the resistance, then? You just laid out the model that would be more functional. How do you think things move forward?
Marianna: That’s a very good question. I think sometimes we get locked into ways of thinking. I see professionally a lot of the bids that come out from the various directorates, and just by reading those documents you can see the mindset of the people writing them. It’s very hard to break. Once you’ve set up a system in a certain way, there is inertia. Changing that is very, very difficult. One of the things Italy in the end decided to do was that the rejuvenation of its public sector was not so much about retraining people or changing the mindset, but hoping to get them to retire as quickly as possible and try to change the mindset of the new generation. It’s very difficult to change something that was born and brought up in a certain way. So this is one of the problems — except that unfortunately my feeling is that we don’t have the time right now. We have been put in a position not to have the time to change. The question is how to do this rapidly. It’s not clear to me what the answer is, but I do believe in trickle-down effects, leadership by example. If certain things started to change — one of the things we discussed in preparing the podcast was, why don’t we have more news on TV about what happens in Brussels every day? You turn on the news and watch your local news. You never know what’s going up there. These are small things, but they would get people a lot more involved.
Ricardo: Marco and Marianna, you both mentioned the younger generation. So I’m going to have a final note to Filippo, because you are the youngest in the room. But before that, I do have the solution, and I’m not going to be a millionaire because of it — because you mentioned the US system. We need to move to a bicameral model in the European Union. We need a new treaty, I know, or a treaty revision, but that would be the way to solve it. But Filippo, I’m going to give you the final word. What do you think — how can we change this so that younger generations like yourself can have a more flexible, more active, more efficient European Union?
Filippo: One way that has quite worked so far is already putting qualified majority voting into many more processes.
Ricardo: The veto continues to be a problem.
Filippo: Yes, of course. But since it was introduced in more voting procedures, I think that has quite worked. Then, for example, introducing more agencies that are not completely politically controlled — for instance, the EDA for procurement and defence is not similar to DARPA, the US equivalent, which works much faster and has an R&D section with a flat hierarchy of project managers that change every three to five years regardless of the administration. Having agencies that do not work exactly like the Commission or the Parliament is already a step in the right direction. I also think — to quote you, actually — the coalitions of the willing that we’ve seen are some solution, and also the enhanced cooperations. The Unified Patent Court, where there are only 18 members instead of the 27, has proved significantly faster. And one last thing — something that was proposed by Commissioner Kubilius — was to have a European Security Council: six permanent member states and two or three rotating ones, so that the major forces for defence are always on the council, and two or three rotate. That already would prove to be much more effective than having to vote every single time with each one.
Ricardo: We’re coming to the end of this panel. So thank you so much, Annarita Morelli, Marco Cecchi de Rossi, Marianna Vintiadis, and Filippo De Nicola. Thank you so much also to the Adam Smith Society. This has been a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast.
Ricardo: This is all for now. I’ll be back soon with more podcasts. You can always visit the website liberalforum.eu to know more about the activities of the European Liberal Forum. Until the next episode, let’s keep making the world a better place.