Brussels, 21/02/2003 (Agence Europe) - Germany appears to favour the idea of a transition period for the scrapping of multiple voting rights in the framework of the merger directive, according to Community sources on Friday. Sweden and France are reported to be opposing the idea. Council negotiations over this issue are still at an early stage.
On Thursday, the Greek Presidency unveiled a draft compromise to the Council working group on mergers, along with a draft progress report (to be discussed at the Competitiveness Council on 7 March, before the technical negotiations take up again on 12 March). A spokesperson for the Internal Market Commissioner said the Commission saw the document as providing a good basis for a compromise. Discussions will focus on three controversial articles: Article 9 (forcing management boards of companies for which hostile bids have been made to take defensive measures); Article 10 (information to be provided by companies for which bids have been made about how its shares and voting rights are organised) and Article 11 (threshold and rules for merger restrictions to be lifted). Germany, along with the European Parliament rapporteur, Klaus-Heinz Lehne, is calling for the scrapping of multiple voting rights enabling shareholders to keep control of a company, even if they have a minority share holding. The Commission did not tackle this in its proposal. More than half of Swedish companies have such voting rights and Sweden is the country most opposed to them being scrapped. Greece is reported to be suggesting scrapping multiple voting rights five years after the directive comes into force, viz. in 2010. Application of Article 9 would be put back to 2010 (2008 is foreseen in the proposal). According to the proposed compromise, it would no longer be possible to take defensive measures where a bidder already held 75% of the shares of the company in question. The Commission's proposal did not set a threshold.