This successful textbook remains the only offering for students of European company law, and has been fully updated.

The evolving strategies and structure of large European firms are examined in a comparative and historical context, and in the context of a range of hypotheses associated with Alfred Chandler.

This fully updated new edition provides the best-known practical overview of the law regarding companies, business activities, and capital markets in Europe, at both the European Union (EU) and Member State levels. It incorporates analysis of recent developments including the impact of global initiatives in such aspects of the corporate environment as regulation of financial institutions and non-financial reporting obligations with a view to sustainability and other social responsibility concerns. The authors, all leading experts in European corporate law, describe current and emerging trends in such areas of corporate law practice as the following: - rules on cross-border mergers; - employee involvement in business activities; - the initiatives by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the EU to curb tax avoidance; - Member States’ implementation of EU legislation; - a company’s freedom to incorporate in a jurisdiction not its own; - competition among the legal forms of different Member States; and - safeguarding of employee involvement in cross-border transactions. With respect to national law, the laws of Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom are taken into account; Italy is now included in this new edition. As in earlier editions, the authors demonstrate that analysis and comparison of national corporate laws yield highly valuable general principles and observations, not least because business organizations, wherever located, tend to show a fundamentally similar set of legal characteristics. The Third Edition will continue to be of great value to practitioners and academics who wish to acquire a better understanding of European corporate law, in its supranational dimension as well as in the similarities and differences among the various national legal systems.

The harmonization of company law has always been on the agenda of the European Union. Besidesthe protection of third parties affected by business transactions, the founders had two other objectives: first, promoting freedom of establishment, and second, preventing the abuse of such freedom. The European Commission issued its Company Law Action Plan in 2003. In this volume researchers of the Jan Ronse Institute for Company Law of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven present five chapters on the main priorities of the Action Plan: capital and creditor protection,corporate governance, one share one vote, financial reporting, and corporate mobility. The book also includes responses and ensuing discussions by reputed European company law experts.

The product of a long-standing collaboration and recent collective research effort by members of the CGEUI network, The European Corporation makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over convergence to the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance and persistence in corporate governance and law in Europe. This book fills the gap in the debate, and literature's lack of country-specific evidence on the evolution of ownership and control which has proven to be a serious impediment to both legal and economic analysis and evidence-based policymaking. It provides systematic and comparable accounts of ownership and control structure change (respectively persistence) in large firms across Europe over the decades following the 'global corporate governance revolution' in the 1990s. Focusing on countries in Europe's four main regions, this volume presents and discusses the net effects of the interplay between the 'global corporate governance revolution' and of its main countervailing forces in Europe.

The book provides students of European company law courses, scholars and practitioners with an overview. Although company law remains mainly regulated at the level of national laws, it has become important to obtain a systematic view of the main directives in the field of company law, the EU Court of Justice’s jurisprudence, the European Model Company Act and the state of implementation of these directives in the member states of the Union. The book therefore contains, in addition to the illustration of the law laid down by EU legislative bodies and the related soft laws, detailed references to the most important domestic legislations and case laws, in order to make them known and usable as much as possible. Moreover, the book allows identifying the most relevant current legislative trends and the main historical reasons for divergences.

Global finance is in the middle of a radical transformation fueled by innovative financial technologies. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the digitization of retail financial services in Europe. Institutional interest and digital asset markets are also growing blurring the boundaries between the token economy and traditional finance. Blockchain, AI, quantum computing and decentralised finance (DeFI) are setting the stage for a global battle of business models and philosophies. The post-Brexit EU cannot afford to ignore the promise of digital finance. But the Union is struggling to keep pace with global innovation hubs, particularly when it comes to experimenting with new digital forms of capital raising. Calibrating the EU digital finance strategy is a balancing act that requires a deep understanding of the factors driving the transformation, be they legal, cultural, political or economic, as well as their many implications. The same FinTech inventions that use AI, machine learning and big data to facilitate access to credit may also establish invisible barriers that further social, racial and religious exclusion. The way digital finance actors source, use, and record information presents countless consumer protection concerns. The EU’s strategic response has been years in the making and, finally, in September 2020 the Commission released a Digital Finance Package. This special issue collects contributions from leading scholars who scrutinize the challenges digital finance presents for the EU internal market and financial market regulation from multiple public policy perspectives. Author contributions adopt a critical yet constructive and solutions-oriented approach. They aim to provide policy-relevant research and ideas shedding light on the complexities of the digital finance promise. They also offer solid proposals for reform of EU financial services law.

Europe has known very different systems of company laws for a long time. These differences do not only pertain to the board structures of public companies, where single-tier and two-tier structures can be distinguished, they also pertain to the principles of fixed legal capital. Fixed legal capital is not a traditional ingredient of English and Irish company law and had to be incorpo-rated into these legal systems (only) for public limited companies according to the Second European Company Law Directive of 1976. Both jurisdictions have never really embraced these rules. Against this background, the British Accounting Standards Board (ASB) and the Company Law Centre at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) have initiated and supported a study of the benefits of this legal system by a group of experts led by Jonathan Rickford. The report of this group has been published in 2004. Its result was that legal capital was costly and superfluous; hence, the Second Directive should be repealed. The British government has adopted this view and wants the European Commission to act accordingly. Against this background a group of German and European company law experts, academics as well as practitioners, have come together to scrutinise sense and benefits of fixed legal capital and all its specific elements guided by the following questions: What is the relevant legal concept supposed to achieve? What does it achieve in reality? What criticisms are there? Which proposals or alternatives are available? From the outset the group of experts has endeavoured to cooperate with foreign colleagues, which resulted in very fruitful and pleasant exchanges. This volume contains, besides an executive summary of the results, 16 essays on specific aspects of legal capital in Germany covering also neighbouring fields of law (e.g. accounting, insolvency);7 reports on fixed legal capital in other jurisdictions (France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.S.A.) addressing the same questions as the essays on German law. The British initiative disapproves of the Second Directive. The Directive does only deal with public limited companies in Europe, which is reflected in the analysis presented here. It is only concerned with the fixed legal capital of public limited companies, not with capital issues of private companies. The study has arrived at a result that differs completely from that of the Rickford group. It verifies the usefulness of the concept of fixed legal capital and wishes to convince the European Commission of the benefits of the Second Company Law Directive.

The recent financial crisis has once again stressed the importance of good corporate governance and corporate social responsibility in building trust in the European internal market. It has given rise to a discussion of whether a number of issues should be addressed through regulation or soft law at EU level. These issues relate in particular to the duties of directors in European companies as well as how the board of directors is composed and structured. Drawing attention first to duties of directors and then to the organisation of the board, this appropriately timed analysis takes stock of the status of the initiatives that have been debated so far, examines whether the rules which have been adopted form a coherent system, and suggests ways in which these initiatives affect national law. Topics covered include the following: directors' conflicts of interest; rules on shareholder transparency; duty to promote active ownership; whether it is possible to find a balance between corporate enterprise and risk control; integration of environmental and social concerns in the decision-making of the company; the board's role as a monitor of management; overcoming managerial deficiencies; the concept of independent directors; independence from a controlling shareholder; nomination of board members; disqualification of directors; and directors duties in groups of companies.

Over the last decade, European company law has been completely re-written. Virtually no EU measure remained unchanged and most of them have undergone fundamental reform. This is astonishing since almost half of these measures only came into existence after the turn of the millennium. In the last five years, 'modern' European company law has been characterized by a strong foundation of accounting law: i.e. the basic information scheme in international models (IFRS); the practicability and reality of cross-border mobility in its different types; and the considerable success (at last) of European company types, namely in the form of the European Company, which has been adopted by many blue chip companies, and, finally, by governance. The latter is also experiencing a remarkable renaissance of shareholders' rights, namely voting right schemes. In times of crisis, this is the equipment with which the challenges have to be met. European Company Law first discusses the EC/EU law, including all instruments through which it is transposed into the national law systems. However, where no EC/EU law exists, a comparative law discussion and the policy aspects - namely law and economics - fill the gaps. The whole organism of (limited liability) company law is thus covered. In addition to organization, accounting, finance, and the closely-related capital market law, this second edition covers the cornerstones of EC/EU corporate tax and insolvency law. This broad scientific perspective of the 'European' in company law remains unique and will be of greatest value for top-level practice and highly-ranked policy discussions. (Series: Ius Communitatis - Vol. 1)