Places IS THE SAME as Google Local. It's designed for the local business.

That being said, you can get an international company a Places page but only in their home town and/or areas where they have satellite offices (physical addresses).

The real question... will your customer benefit from local exposure enough to warrant it or should you concentrate spending their money on more organic domination?

I've dealt with tons of dupes because all my clients have them. Certain industries like Medical, Dental and Legal tend to have more dupes due to Google scraping.

There are lots of different types of dupes: ghost dupes, rogue dupes, mirror dupes, split dupes, innocent dupes. I give them all names.

There are also several ways to deal with dupes and the best way depends on the type of dupe. If a dupe has stolen trust points from the main listing and/or is outranking it, you don't want to delete it, you want to merge. BUT if the dupe has violations you need to be careful so they don't merge into the main listing.

If a dupe is unclaimed sometimes there are better ways to get rid of it than claiming and suspending. But which way to go depends on if it's innocent or problematic. If it's stealing reviews or has a wrong phone number or is confusing customers because G got the address wrong, then you need to decide the best way based on that particular situation.

Word of warning: If a dupe is claimed and has already MERGED with the main listing (you can tell if it's merged if the stats are exactly the same) never delete from maps or suspend as it can also delete the main listing.
BUT you need to get rid of it so you don't get your main listing rejected or suspended, so you want to hit delete, then remove from my account.

Word of warning #2: Dupes can be a nightmare, can take months to deal with and if they are scraped dupes they will almost always come back unless you fix the upstream data that's causing them.