EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation – Advantage or Burden?

Enrico Letta served as Prime Minister of Italy from 2013 to 2014. Currently, he is the Dean of the IE School of Politics, Economics, and Global Affairs at IE University, and President of the Jacques Delors Institute. In September 2023 the European institutions tasked him with the elaboration a Report on the Future of the Single Market. 

From March 2021 to February 2023, he was the National Secretary of the Democratic Party in Italy. Prior to that, from 2015 to 2021, he was Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po Paris.

In 2019, he was appointed President of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA) for a two-year term. Earlier in his career, Letta served as Minister for EU Affairs (1998–1999), Minister for Industry, Trade and Crafts (2000), Minister for Industry and Foreign Trade (2000–2001), and Undersecretary of State to Prime Minister Romano Prodi (2006–2008). 

Antonio Nicita is Professor of Economic Policy at LUMSA University (Palermo-Rome) and, since September 2022, Senator of the Italian Republic.

From 2021 to 2022 he was member of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board of the European Commission, while from 2014 to 2020, he was Commissioner of the Italian Communication Authority (AGCOM).

Alongside his academic career, Antonio Nicita has been dealing with a broad arrays of topics in the fileds of regulation, antitrust, law & economics, institutional economics, business theory, digital economy and media, pluralism, and hate-speech, holding positions at the Advisory Board of the Italian Transport Authority (ART), the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Ministry for Technological Innovation (task force on Big Data), the Ministry of Communications (Technical Secretariat), and the Italian Competition Authority (AGCM - Economic Advisor to the President).

Among his most recent publications:

• A. Nicita (2025) Nell'età dell'odio. Sfera pubblica, intolleranza, democrazia, Il Mulino
• C. Cambini, A. Manganelli, G. Napolitano, A. Nicita (2024) Economa e Diritto della Regolazione, Il Mulino,
• A. Manganelli, A. Nicita (2022) Regulating Digital Markets. The European Approach, Palgrave MacMillan 
• A. Nicita (2021) Il Mercato delle Verità. Come la disinformazione minaccia la democrazia, Il Mulino

Bonifacio García Porras currently serves as the Head of the "Foreign Subsidies" Unit within the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship, and SMEs (DG GROW). In this role, he leads a newly established team responsible for the implementation of the Foreign Subsidies Regulation in the context of public procurement, ensuring a level playing field across the EU internal market.

Before assuming his current position, Bonifacio was head of unit responsible for SMEs policy within the European Commission and previously assumed the role as the European Union’s chief negotiator for the plurilateral Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) under the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework, where he played a key role in advancing international public procurement standards.

He holds a law degree from the University of Salamanca (Spain, 1992), where he also pursued studies in macroeconomics and microeconomics. He obtained a Magister Legum (LL.M.) in European Legal Studies from the College of Europe in Bruges (Belgium, 1993). Bonifacio is a member of the Salamanca Bar and practiced European law for over seven years at leading Brussels law firms before joining the European Commission in 2000.

Throughout his career at the Commission, Bonifacio has held various high-level roles, including positions in the cabinets of Vice-President Loyola de Palacio and Commissioner Andris Piebalgs, with a focus on state aid, transport, and energy. He has also contributed to strategic areas such as the European Semester, public procurement, innovation, and communication, bringing a comprehensive and multidisciplinary perspective to EU policymaking.

Henri Piffaut is an Adviser with the European Commission - DG COMP in Brussels, focusing on foreign subsidies. Previously, he was Vice President of the French Competition Authority, and an Adviser to the Deputy Director General for mergers at DG COMP.

He has spent most of his career in the competition policy field. During the academic year 2016/17 he served as a fellow at Harvard University where he pursued research on the interaction of competition policy and platform industries.

He has dealt with pay-for-delay cases in the pharmaceutical industry, conduct and merger cases in the energy, payment systems, IT and telecom industries, and State intervention in the transport industry. He holds degrees in science and engineering, political science and economics. 

Aude-Laure currently works at the Aide team (State aid & Foreign subsidies) of the Legal Service of the European Commission. 

Aude-Laure is a French qualified lawyer, graduated from the Paris II Panthéon-Assas University (with one year of study at the Charles University in Prague) and the College of Europe in Bruges.

After her traineeship in Paris, she worked in private practice in Brussels in the law from Cleary Gottlieb for 4+ years and she worked in DG COMP as a merger case handler. She worked on gun jumping cases and the Article 22 policy.

Carmelo Fontana is Senior Regional Counsel at Google, where he leads the company’s commercial and regulatory legal practice in Italy. A dual-qualified attorney in California and Italy, Carmelo brings over two decades of experience at the intersection of law, technology, and innovation.

His expertise spans privacy and data protection, intellectual property, content licensing, intermediary liability, and digital regulation. Prior to joining Google in 2011, Carmelo held roles at Cleary Gottlieb in Rome and the European Commission Legal Service. He also co-founded a tech start-up operating across the U.S. and Asia.

Carmelo holds an LL.M. in Law, Science, and Technology from Stanford Law School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He has also served as a Research Fellow at the Stanford Transatlantic Technology Law Forum.

Dr. Lena Hornkohl studied law in Heidelberg and Uppsala. After obtaining her first state exam in 2014, she completed her legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court Karlsruhe (with stages, inter alia, at the European Commission) and completed the second state exam in 2016.

After having earned a master’s degree from the College of Europe in European Law and Economic Analysis in 2019, she received a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg for a dissertation on the protection of confidential information in private enforcement of European Competition Law in 2020.  

During her doctoral studies, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Chair for Civil Law, Corporate and Commercial Law, European Law and Comparative Law of Professor Müller-Graff at the University of Heidelberg. In 2019, she commenced her work as a lawyer in the competition law department of a major international law form in Brussels before joining the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of European and Comparative Procedural Law in 2020. In 2022, she was appointed as Tenure Track Professor for European Law at the University of Vienna. She is currently also pursuing her postdoctoral studies (Habilitation) at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dres.h.c. Burkhard Hess, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Thomas Pfeiffer und Prof. Dr. Christian Heinze. Her research interests focus on European, Economic, Private, Procedural and Comparative Law. 

Lena Hornkohl has taught at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the University of Trier, University of Heidelberg, the European University Institute, Ghent University, the Summer School of the University of Vienna, the University of Applied Sciences for the Administration of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Justice Academy of North Rhine-Westphalia. She is the president of IUS Omnibus, a member of the board of CELIS, and an editor at the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice (JECLAP), the Multimedia und Recht - Zeitschrift für IT-Recht und Recht der Digitalisierung (MMR), the EU Law Live Competition Corner, and the Kluwer Competition Law Blog.   

Pierfrancesco Mattiolo is a PhD candidate and a graduate teaching and research assistant at the University of Antwerp.

He is conducting his doctoral research on the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation and its interaction with competition and trade law.

In Antwerp, he teaches substantive EU law to undergraduate students and contributes to the LLM advanced courses on European Economic Regulation and Competition Law.

He is one of the managing editors of the CELIS Blog, an emerging forum for discussing law and economic security.

He has been invited to give seminars and teach at other academic institutions (inter alia, Sciences Po, the University of Bologna, and Zhongnan University of Economics and Law) and to share his expertise with European stakeholders.

Before starting his PhD, he gained experience as a policy assistant trainee at the Trade Policy Unit of the Permanent Representation of Italy to the EU in Brussels, and as an assistant project manager at the School of Policies in Rome. In addition to his academic and professional pursuits, Pierfrancesco collaborates with the Italy-ASEAN Association and ChinaFiles, a leading Italian news agency specialising in Asian affairs, on economic and trade matters. 

Ester Latorre is an Italian-qualified lawyer and researcher specialising in European Union law, competition law, and State aid. 

She holds a PhD in EU and competition law from the University of Milan, with a dissertation on the definition of State aid and the potential modernisation of the legal framework governing the sector. She is currently a research fellow at the University of Eastern Piedmont. 

She has authored numerous publications in leading legal journals and is a frequent speaker at both academic and professional conferences. 

Ester is a member of the Milan office of Greenberg Traurig, where she advises national and international clients on domestic and cross-border M&A transactions.