Spain becomes the western capital of the New Silk Road

International Legal Forum

Grandall Law Firm creates an international legal alliance based in Madrid to promote economic exchanges with China.

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Grandall Law Firm, the fourth largest law firm in Chinaannounced in Madrid the creation of one international legal platform who aspires to become the greatest world legal services alliance. The Chinese firm will centralize through its Madrid office Grandall SpainLaw Firm this platform whose objective is to promote internationalization of Chinese companies in Europe and Latin America within a framework of legality, legal certainty and international regulatory compliance, forging the Silk Road of the 21st century.

 

The choice of Spain as the headquarters of the new platform is due to the country's attractiveness for chinese investors. In 2016, the Asian power's investments in Spain quadrupled to reach 1.800 billion dollars. As highlighted by the commercial attaché of ICEX Spain Exports and Investments, Alicia Tamames, the country constitutes a bridge between Europe, Latin America and the Middle East both geographically and culturally. Food industry, plastic and rubber manufacturing, machinery, transport equipment and building construction are the most attractive indigenous sectors for Chinese investors. 

 

More than 60 participated in the platform's inaugural event. chinese lawyers, Europeans and Latin Americans convinced that globalization will lead to a boom in advisory services for companies worldwide in the coming years. For this reason, the founders of the alliance plan to create a legal cooperation network to help companies generate business opportunities. investment abroad.

 

Areas such as commercial agreements, contracting, investment, dispute resolution and capital traceability are based on different regulatory frameworks depending on each country and require teams of lawyers with multi-jurisdictional experience.

 

 

 

The choice of Spain as the headquarters of the new platform is due to the country's attractiveness for Chinese investors

 

 

 

The creation of this alliance comes six days before the president of the government, Mariano Rajoy, participate in the summit on New Silk Road to be held in Pekin. Presented in 2013 by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, this initiative recreates the ancient Silk Road connecting the economic belt that unites China with Europe, the Middle East and Africa to promote trade relations between countries belonging to this area. For the first time, European states such as Spain, Switzerland and Italy.

 

According to Li Chun, founding partner of the Gandall group, “the New Silk Road offers emerging opportunities in Europe y Latin America. The initiative is opening up to the participation of new countries and also to investment in new sectors beyond infrastructure, such as agriculture, services, machinery or business parks.”

 

To Raquel García-Argudo Mendes, partner at Grandall Madrid, “the Chinese government's priority is for small and medium-sized companies to go abroad to occupy a leadership position on the international scene. However, there are still high difficulties and access barriers for Chinese investment abroad, so international cooperation between lawyers is more necessary than ever if we want to obtain the trust of Chinese investments.”

 

One of the biggest difficulties for Chinese investment in Europe is the lack of traceability of banking operations in the Asian country, which explains why some investments are blocked upon arriving in Europe.

 

On the other hand, the Chinese government continues to supervise the outflow of capital in mergers and acquisitions abroad due to the risk of devaluation of the yuan. However, earlier this year, President Xi Jinping announced investments worth 750.000 million abroad over the next eight years.