I live in Warsaw, Poland. I moved here from London at the start of 2022 with my family, having already spent several years working in the region, and it has turned out to be one of the better decisions I have made. I have a young daughter and I am delighted she will grow up in this region. I still travel to London frequently, where the business is registered.
Before founding EU Mandate I spent more than twenty years in enterprise sales, strategic partnerships and complex cross-border transactions, structuring over £100 million in deals. That is a commercial background rather than a legal or an accounting one, and it explains a good deal about how this firm works. I have sat on the buying side of enough advisory relationships to know how frustrating they can be — technically correct advice arriving too late, in a form nobody can act on, from someone with no view on whether the business should be doing this at all.
So the firm was built around a different question.
Not only whether a structure is compliant, though it has to be, but whether it allows you to sell.
The pattern I kept encountering was always the same. A business decides to enter Europe. It hires a law firm to form the entity, then a tax adviser, then somebody else for VAT, then a logistics broker to find a warehouse, an accountant in the new country, and a nominee director because the regulation requires a local person. Five or six firms, five or six engagement letters, five or six views of the operation. Each of them does their own part perfectly well. The failures happen in the spaces between them, and they are discovered late, usually by the client, usually at some expense.
EU Mandate exists to hold the whole of it. Where a formal legal or tax opinion is needed I engage a qualified specialist and manage them; the opinion is theirs, the coordination and the accountability are mine. Where a decision is commercial, I make it with the client rather than referring it onward. And where it is useful, I take a formal position inside the structure itself, as a director or as the named responsible person, because a structure with nobody in it is a registered address and a filing deadline. You deal with me throughout, not with an associate who escalates.
The Ukrainian side of the practice was not planned. I have travelled to Ukraine many times since February 2022, initially running humanitarian work. I do not offer that as a professional qualification, because it is not one. It is simply how I came to know the country, and eventually the people running businesses in it.
What followed was unexpected. Ukrainian companies started approaching me about selling into Western markets, and it became clear very quickly that a great many capable manufacturers were shut out of the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States for reasons that had nothing at all to do with what they produced. No entity a buyer could contract with. Compliance obligations that cannot legally be held from outside the market. Tender documents that exclude a foreign supplier before anyone examines the product. And, again and again, nobody able to sit in the room and negotiate in English.
Those are the same problems I had spent years solving in the opposite direction. So I built a practice around them, and it has become some of the most satisfying work I do.
Meetings with Western counterparties are held in English, which is the working language of those markets in any case. In Ukraine, conversations can be held in Ukrainian with my colleague Roman Dupai, Principal, Market Expansion (Ukraine), who is based in Ternopil and works with manufacturers from the first conversation onwards.
I would expect anyone considering any of this to check it, and very little in cross-border advisory should be taken on assurance. EU Mandate & Co. is a trading name of Red Consortium Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 16495425; the registration is public and verifiable at Companies House. I write regularly on Polish corporate structure, VAT and customs treatment, and product compliance, and all of it is published in the Insights section of this site. None of it is written to impress anyone, which makes it a reasonably fair way to judge whether I know the subject.
Whether you are moving into Europe or out of Ukraine into Western markets, a first conversation costs nothing and is usually enough to establish whether there is anything worth doing. If there isn't, I will say so.