The European Parliament approved, on Thursday 18 April, by a large majority, the outcome of the negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on the company law legislative package (see EUROPE 12009/8).
By 511 votes to 54 with 16 abstentions, MEPs gave the green light to the interinstitutional agreement reached at the beginning of March (see EUROPE 12213/24) on the proposal for a directive on harmonised procedures for cross-border divisions and transfers and a targeted review for mergers.
"What we have achieved is a real milestone, given the complexity of the directive", said Evelyn Regner (S&D, Austria), rapporteur on the subject, during the debate preceding the vote.
Last but not least, in just five weeks and 110 hours of negotiations, the institutions managed to agree on a text that will, for the first time, set a comprehensive set of European rules to allow companies to move from one Member State to another or to divide into several entities on a cross-border basis, she said.
In particular, the new rules establish procedures to verify the legality of cross-border operations and to introduce a mandatory anti-abuse control procedure. They also guarantee the protection of workers' rights to information, consultation and participation in the event of cross-border transactions.
MEPs also approved, by 522 votes to 54 with 6 abstentions, the Interinstitutional Agreement (see EUROPE 12187/18) on the proposal for a directive to facilitate the use of digital tools for company registration and online information management.
The agreement maintains the key element of the proposal that Member States will now have to provide a fully online procedure for the registration of limited liability companies and the establishment of branches. So far, only 17 Member States have allowed this possibility.
The new rules will drastically reduce a company's registration time to 5-10 working days, announced the rapporteur on this issue, Tadeusz Zwiefka (EPP, Poland).
While the Directive is currently intended to apply to limited liability companies, he hoped that, in a few years' time, it could be extended to all types of companies.
Approval is also required at BusinessEurope, for which these new rules will allow for "finally bringing EU Company law into the 21st century". However, the organisation pointed out that, for these European instruments to be fully effective, national requirements should not diverge too much from each other in the implementation phase.
See the approved texts on corporate mobility: https://bit.ly/2UIBKb4 and on the digitisation of procedures: https://bit.ly/2DiAKzG (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)