Advisory Services

The European regulatory perimeter on supply chains, exports, and sanctions has expanded faster than most in-house compliance functions can absorb. We work with companies that have material exposure to this expansion and need senior advisory capacity to translate the obligations into operating models that hold up under audit, board scrutiny, and enforcement attention.

Our work in this pillar covers the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) — readiness assessments, value chain mapping, supplier prioritisation frameworks, evidence collection design, and the integration of due diligence into procurement and risk processes. We advise on EU sanctions compliance beyond list screening, including beneficial ownership analysis, third-country circumvention exposure, the new obligations on unlawful IP use introduced by the twentieth sanctions package, and the design of continuous monitoring rather than episodic checks. We support dual-use posture reviews for civilian companies whose products may be reclassified in context — end-use assessment frameworks, customer undertaking documentation, and internal export-control processes calibrated to the current geopolitical perimeter rather than peacetime trade assumptions. We design human rights due diligence approaches for high-risk jurisdictions, drawing on the UN Guiding Principles and the IFC Performance Standards where corporate frameworks need to interface with institutional safeguards.

Typical engagements range from focused diagnostic reviews of four to eight weeks to multi-month operating model builds, with retainer arrangements for ongoing compliance support where in-house capacity is constrained.

Operating in or adjacent to conflict-affected and post-conflict environments is not a country-risk question. It is a question of how a company holds together its commercial logic, its compliance posture, its security arrangements, and its accountability to stakeholders when the operating environment does not behave like the rest of its portfolio. This is where the firm's frontline operational experience is most directly relevant.

We advise on entry, presence, and exit strategies — what it takes to engage responsibly, what it takes to maintain a defensible posture under uncertainty, and what it takes to disengage without producing the kind of stakeholder impact that CSDDD and reputational scrutiny now make visible. We support security and protection risk advisory aligned to IFC Performance Standard 4 and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, with particular attention to private security arrangements that most companies operating in conflict environments rely on but few document adequately. We provide independent third-party monitoring and assurance for donor- and investor-funded operations where institutional safeguards require external verification that the implementing entity cannot credibly provide on its own.

Engagements in this pillar are typically anchored by a specific operating decision — an entry, an exit, a safeguards review, a monitoring mandate — and structured to deliver an output the client can use in board, investment committee, or institutional discussions.

Ukraine is the operational frontier of nearly every regulatory and institutional architecture we work with. It is where CSDDD obligations meet contested geography, where sanctions screening meets corporate ownership chains shaped by successive reforms and wartime conditions, and where the EU Ukraine Facility and DFI co-financing instruments are translating policy commitment into procurement reality.

We support corporates with Ukraine-relevant exposure on the regulatory and operational questions that our other pillars address — calibrated to the specifics of the Ukrainian environment, not adapted from generic frameworks. We work with DFIs and bilateral donors on safeguards design, third-party monitoring, and conflict-sensitive due diligence for Ukraine-portfolio operations. We advise Italian institutional and corporate actors with Ukraine engagement — industrial groups, investment vehicles, and ministries — on EU regulatory navigation and on the institutional and operational realities of Ukrainian counterparties. The firm maintains an active presence in country and working relationships with Ukrainian counterparts in government, professional services, and the reconstruction ecosystem.

What we offer here is not country expertise as a commodity. It is a translation function — between EU institutional logic and Ukrainian operational reality, in both directions, held together by someone who has worked seriously on both sides.

salientone.eu/screen is a sanctions and adverse-media screening capability we developed for use in our own onboarding and counterparty review work, and made available externally on a freemium basis. It is useful for first-line counterparty checks and for clients without dedicated screening tooling. Substantive sanctions compliance, as covered in our Regulatory Advisory pillar, requires analytical work that goes beyond what any screening tool can provide.

Engagements are partner-led from scoping through delivery. We work in three modalities: scoped time-and-materials engagements for defined questions, fixed-fee diagnostic and readiness assessments where a clean output is the deliverable, and retainer arrangements where an anchor client needs ongoing senior capacity. We do not operate a leverage model. The partner who scopes the work is the partner who delivers it, supported by selected associates and subject-matter specialists where the engagement warrants.

We are selective about the work we take on. We decline mandates where we are not the right firm — most often because the question is better suited to specialist legal counsel, because the budget does not permit senior delivery at the quality we are willing to put our name on, or because the engagement would create positioning conflicts with existing or anticipated work. Where we decline, we will say so clearly, and where possible we will suggest a better-suited adviser.