62 | ROSEMARY DE ROUGEMONT THE LAST WORD WORDS | John Howell
Algarve to Ascot
Rosemary de Rougemont seems as English as they come but she runs one of the leading law fi rms in Portugal and Cape Verde. How and why did this happen? What does she think about the current situations in these two countries?
R
osemary de Rougemont has been synonymous with Portuguese law for a long time.
Rosemary, who is Englsih, went to live in Portugal when she was a little girl in the early 1960s.
Of course, back then, Portugal was a very different place.
It was ruled, with a rod of iron, by the highly conservative, nationalistic António de Oliveira Salazar. He had been in power since 1932 and stayed there (depending on your point of view) by either his charm and personality or by virtue of the secret police and the ruthless repression of civil liberties. Yet Salazar is still held in great affection: he was voted the greatest Portuguese person ever in a public poll in 2007. He fi nally lost power as result of the Carnation Revolution in 1974. In many ways his story runs parallel
with that of General Franco in Spain. Just like Spain, Portugal was then a deeply conservative and illiberal
society hovering between the fi rst and the third world. So it didn’t go down very well that Rosemary’s family was very well known but her mother was (we’d best just whisper this) divorced and living on her own with a little girl. As a child, Rosemary saw the injustices heaped upon her mother and the practical diffi culties associated with dealing
“Few lawyers in Portugal had expertise in residential property transactions”
with the byzantine complexity of the Portuguese legal system. She decided to become a lawyer.
She also decided, at more or less the same time, that she could no longer live in Albufi era or, come to that, anywhere else in Salazar’s Portugal. So she came
back to England to study law. But Portugal was changing. Rosemary graduated as a lawyer just after the revolution and, as her career developed, Rosemary worked hard to create the opportunity to go back and to work in Portugal, fi rst as an English lawyer and, later, as a qualifi ed Portuguese lawyer - advogado After a period working for a number of well known law fi rms in Portugal, she set up her own, which later became Neville de Rougemont, in 1987. Once again, Portugal was changing. The British and other foreign buyers had discovered the delights of Southern Portugal and they wanted to buy property there. They soon discovered that it was not that easy.
Few local lawyers had any expertise in residential property transactions: most saw their job as defending the interests of clients in court. Fortunately, Rosemary was interested in this subject and became an expert in it. She wrote
You can contact Rosemary de Rougemont by email at
r.derougemont@
ndr.pt or by telephone at +441628 778566
“Your Home in Portugal” in 1989 and, since then, she has written a number of other books including “The Manual of the Portuguese Foreign Investment and Trade Offi ce” and “A Guide to the Portuguese Property Tax Reforms.” She, therefore, became very busy and her empire grew to four offi ces. She and her fi rm have a prestigious list of clients as well as many hundreds of private individuals. To fi ll in her few idle moments she served as Chairman of the Portuguese UK Chamber of Commerce for a number of years. So what does Rosemary actually
do? “Almost all of the work of our fi rm relates to real estate in Portugal and Cape Verde,” she told us. “It is not just buying the property but dealing with all of the problems that arise out of the ownership of property in these two countries.”
Even with a substantial team, managing four offi ces in three different countries must have its challenges? “Over the years there have been a number of challenges, many of them resulting from basic differences in the way in which legal practice works in these countries.
“For example, when we opened our Portugese promise | When foreign buyers started to take interest in Portugal, they needed lawyers with the right knowledge
offi ce in Sal (Cape Verde) in 2005 there was no real tradition or understanding of working as a lawyer in private practice. Most lawyers worked, in one way or another, for the Government. The few law fi rms that existed were very small and had a limited vision of their role. I do not think they foresaw the changes that entering into the world of international property would force upon them.” Was this so very different from when she started to work in Portugal? “Yes: although Portuguese society was very different back then, there had been a tradition of working with foreigners that went back hundreds of years.” What made her go to Cape Verde? “Really, Cape Verde came to me. Our
www.opp.org.uk | JUNE 2012
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68