Fideres’s Co-Founder, Alberto Thomas, contributes to the VII Biennial Conference organized by the Italian Antitrust Association (AAI) in Florence, 8-9 June, intervening in the plenary session “Recent developments in private enforcement”.
Alberto’s speech focused on the innovation and the challenges posed by the Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) in the definition of digital platform markets and its impact on international private enforcement against big tech companies. In particular, he brought the example of two recent decisions adopted by the AGCM with regards to Amazon (proceeding A528) and Amazon/Apple (proceeding I842), describing how they innovated the definition of the relevant market and established Amazon’s dominance in the market for logistic and intermediation services (FBA logistics, Amazon marketplace). Alberto also described how Fideres’s extensive economic analysis was able to replicate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct in Italy, where it has been sanctioned by the AGCM, as well as in other jurisdictions, where private litigation based on the AGCM decisions has been initiated.
In 2009, Alberto co-founded Fideres. As a partner, Alberto has mainly focused on developing market analyses and novel methodologies aimed at identifying anomalous or illicit behaviors such as: market manipulation, benchmark fixing manipulation, product mis-selling, anti-competitive conduct and discrimination conduct.
Since 2014 Alberto is the managing partner of Fideres Inc USA, Fideres’s US arm. Alberto has acted in an expert witness capacity in disputes involving banks and brokers, on one side, and institutional investors or consumers, on the other side. Examples of such disputes include mis-selling claims on complex financial derivative products and hedging solutions, LIBOR manipulation and fraud claims.
From 2005 to 2009, Alberto was head of Structured Products at the Royal Bank of Scotland in London, leading a team responsible for the structuring of synthetic credit derivatives products and customer driven solutions. In this capacity Alberto oversaw the development and execution of structured products such as CLOs, CDOs, credit default swaps, total return swaps.
From 2004 to 2005, Alberto led the Fixed Income team as Director, Head of Structuring at ABN AMRO. In this role, Alberto was responsible for the delivery of credit related solutions to institutional clients, for developing and executing regulatory capital and balance sheet solutions for global financial institutions, and for developing fund structure for the commercialization to private investors of structured products utilizing fund and insurance products platforms.
From 1997 to 2004, Alberto was at the UBS Limited as Fixed Income. Between 2003 and 2004 Alberto was Global Head of Structuring. In this role, Alberto led a team responsible for the Interest Rates and Credit Derivative Structured Products Desk.
Alberto began his career in New York, where he joined Credit Agricole in 1996 as an Associate in the Structured Products team.
Alberto holds two engineering Masters Degrees: from Ecole Centrale Paris, France and the Polythecnic of Turin, Italy. Alberto is fluent in Italian, French and Spanish.
