(English) Company Setup

My legal thinking was shaped by real business friction. Before joining the Cyprus Bar Association in 2020, I co-founded and ran a boutique digital marketing firm.

In 2012 the company was acquired by an IT group. I stayed on as an executive, now reporting to the board of the new parent company. Our core product ran on a database with tables exceeding 2,000,000 records, and the platform saw connections from up to 300,000 unique IP addresses every month. In 2008, when managed hosting was not yet mainstream, the only provider willing to give us bare-metal infrastructure with a built-in hardware firewall was Rackspace US, Inc. Every upgrade meant a lengthy negotiation with the account manager, since it involved changes to physical equipment, with everything that implied for turnaround time.

That experience prepared me for the next challenge: international outsourcing. I decided to hand a software project to an Indian company, and together with our accountant we recorded the transaction on a cash basis to reflect reality without breaching the ministerial decisions then in force on non-deductible expenses. The tax authority ultimately disallowed the deduction on the dated reasoning that I had never travelled to India, which meant tax and a penalty, but the project still worked out: the final cost stayed 30% below the various quotes from European professionals.

My studies in Business Administration, combined with this first-hand market experience, later found academic and research depth in law, with publications on the indeterminacy of international tax law and on market dynamics in app stores.

My work as a legal researcher for the Central Bank of Cyprus, and as an analyst on GDPR matters for Noyb (Max Schrems' organisation), kept me close to the leading edge of regulatory developments. That theoretical grounding soon turned into hands-on legal practice: representation in trademark disputes against international patent trolls, and resolving demanding employment transfers under EU directives.

In the information age, simply knowing the law is a given. What matters is the ability to anticipate, early, how upcoming regulation will affect your business model and your company's technology integrations.