Informest has promoted the international cooperation project PRO.COOP in collaboration with ICE and with the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, LegaCoop FVG and Confcoop FVG as project partners. Financed by the Law n. 84/2001, the project aimed at sustaining and fostering the Italian cooperative system in the Balkan countries. It thus strengthened the Italian institutional and economic relations with the cooperatives associations in Croatia, Bulgaria and Montenegro, providing assistance and training in the fields of legislative reforms, fiscal systems and civil economy. The project proposed the EU Regulation on the European Cooperative Company and the Italian best-practices as models for the Balkan cooperatives in their harmonization process towards the European standards.

Croatia and Montenegro, despite being on different phases in their EU accession process, share the same background of socialist economies which greatly damaged the positive and productive image of the cooperatives, putting them far away from the modern cooperative systems in Western Europe and other advanced countries. To overcome this situation, the Croatian and Montenegrin Cooperatives Associations face the difficult task of drafting a new law on the cooperative company in their own countries. The PRO.COOP project, intervening in this field, has thus provided – with its own legal experts – assistance, consulting and training activities to the Croatian and Montenegrin associations’ personnel. Therefore, the bills presented to the Croatian and Montenegrin Parliaments contain, at different degrees, the founding institutes of the Italian cooperative company, which proved to be in the course of the years a key actor of a well-balanced economic model between profits, persons and community.

The PRO.COOP project thus changed the focus of its activities from a generic assistance in the internal organization of the target associations to an high-level legal expertise targeted at the cooperative associations, as well as at the local key players in the reform process. The main results of the project are the new Croatian and Montenegrin laws on the cooperative company, rooted in the EU Regulation on the European Cooperative Company as well as in the Italian best experiences. Which is a very important result of the Italian intervention in the Balkans, aimed at bringing closer the two shores of the Adriatic and at setting up modern and international cooperatives.