Estonia EU Presidency Conference
“Crossing Borders, Digitally"
The European Commission has announced its Work Programme for the 2017. Among other perspectives, the Commission intends to “present a company law initiative to facilitate the use of digital technologies throughout a company’s lifecycle and cross-border mergers and divisions”.
Estonia welcomes the Commission’s intentions and is going to organise, in cooperation with the European Commission, a company law conference in order to bring together stakeholders to discuss possible necessary changes in the existing EU company law framework. The conference will take place on 4–5th of September 2017 in Tallinn, Estonia. The conference is planned to cover three different areas of interest: the digital company law, cross-border mobility of companies and applicable law in company law matters.
Digitalisation as a subject matter can cover a variety of possibilities on how to integrate the benefits of digital technologies into company law. Panellists will be able to exchange views on the digital solutions already in place today and share their best practices. Furthermore, it would be a great forum to gather ideas to pave the way for possible developments in EU digital company law.
Cross-border mobility of companies as a subject matter is aimed at the critical analysis (e.g. sufficiency and appropriateness) of the existing EU legal framework (especially EU rules on cross-border mergers), and also the possible need for harmonised EU rules for a much wider range of possibilities of cross-border mobility, i.e. cross-border division, cross-border transfer of registered office (conversion).
According to the Commission’s Work Programme for 2017 the Commission is going to present a new legislative initiative only on cross-border mergers (for improvement) and divisions but no rules for cross-border transfer of registered office. As this latter type of cross-border mobility is already a reality (allowed by the ECJ; but s. also the new pending case C-106/16 - “Polbud”) and many Member States have established already their own rules, there might be a need for EU harmonised rules in this field as well (legal certainty, lower costs, creditors’ and minority shareholders’ protection etc.). The conference will provide important input into the bundle of legal problems and offer a comprehensive perspective on them.
Finally, one cannot touch upon the issues of cross-border mobility of companies without dealing with questions related to law applicable to companies. The conference will be an opportunity to exchange concrete ideas on the future of EU law applicable to companies (e.g. practice of the ECJ, incorporation theory, real seat theory or a compromise between them, scope, links between international company law and international insolvency law etc.).
The conference is targeted for company law policy makers and experts of the Member States and EU institutions, entrepreneurs, legal advisers and other interested parties.
Conference website: http://www.just.ee/en/21st-european-company-law-and-corporate-governance-conference-crossing-borders-digitally
Live stream (4 September): https://livestream.com/eu2017ee/events/7698245
Live stream (5 September): https://livestream.com/eu2017ee/events/7698255/videos/162311035
Draft programme is available here: http://ecoda.org/fileadmin/user_upload/2017_09_04_05_Programme_Preliminary.pdf