Antonello Corrado: I am very honored to moderate this panel that is formed by two very distinguished panelists. One of which is one of the partners of our Swedish member firm, and the non-ILN member is her Excellency, the US Consul General of the United States to South Italy, based in the Naples US Consulate.

I would like to introduce the panelists and I start with Her Excellency, Miss Colombia Barrose. She is a current member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of counselor. She joined the Foreign Service in 1989 and has a counselor and diplomat she has been assigned to a so large number of countries to compete with the many countries represented by the ILN network.

She has been assigned to Santo Domingo, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Washington, Peru, Washington again, Paris, Washington again, Haiti and now Naples. So her experience in her position is huge and vast and we will benefit of it. As a counselor for south Italy in Naples, her Excellency Barrose holds important responsibilities including those pertaining to trade and commerce and commercial relationship between Italy and US. Although not directly involved in TTIP negotiations, we are grateful and we are honored for her outstanding contribution to this panel, giving us her point of view from her wide-angled perspective.

Our second speaker is Jan Frydman, well known in the ILN network, Jan is partner of the law firm Ekenberg & Andersson, where he practices Swedish and international business law and leads the firm’s EU transaction transatlantic practice. He also serves as special advisor to the European Commissioner for Trade, Miss Cecilia Malmstrom. Mr. Frydman’s career has expanded both in business and governmental areas, in Sweden, the United State and European Union Institution in Brussels with a focus on international affairs and transatlantic relationship. Most recently, he has also served as adjunct judge of the Swedish Court of Appeal.

I’ll start this panel with a presentation from our speakers so I’d like to leave the floor to Consul General for her introduction and presentation.

Colombia Barrose: Thank you very much, Antonello and many thanks to all of you. I am very honored to be here today. As you can tell from the Antonello’s description of me, we, as diplomats, do a lot of tours around the world and have to become, as they say, a jack of all trades and master of none. I am out there trying to represent the US government and to give a clear, transparent view of what America is, what we are about, what we are seeking to do, and what our objectives are. So when it comes to something like the TTIP and trade negotiation over the years, I have learned a lot. However, I am certainly not as experienced in these matters as Jan is. He will have a lot more direct insight, but I can talk about how important TTIP is to the relationship between the United States and Europe.

Europe, the EU, is one of our key, strategic partners; not only for security reasons, but also for economic and political reasons. Advancing this relationship through such a negotiation is therefore very important globally. It is very important for the individual countries. It’s important for people. It’s important for people because what TTIP seeks to do is to reduce barriers – whether they are tariff barriers or non-tariff barriers. And by doing this, we hope to be able to have more export and import from both sides. This is good for businesses. This is good for consumers. And this is also good for employees.

The barriers that we have right now make it difficult especially for small and medium enterprises to be able to even get started in exporting. In Italy, approximately 99% of businesses are small or medium enterprises and very few of them – I am sorry, I don’t have the exacts statistic right now – but it is less than 10 % - export anywhere, let alone to the United States. And part of the reason is because it costs too much. Sorry to say this to an audience of lawyers, but often having to hire a lawyer can be a prohibitive cost for a lot of these enterprises – they just simply can’t do it. Therefore, the ability to increase profits by lowering the cost of making a sale and of doing business is an important TTIP objective. This is the basic, very easy and clear way we explain it when talking to Italian groups, be they exporters from the Mozzarella di Buffala consortium, wine exporters, etc.

Read more: http://www.ilntoday.com/2016/04/iln-international-trade-specialty-group-ttip-panel-transatlantic-trade-and-investment-partnership/