La naturaleza del capital social como aspecto diferenciador entre las sociedades cooperativas y las sociedades laborales

International Accounting Standards (IAS) have established that, from the accounting and financial point of view, the share capital of cooperative enterprises is a liability, as it is subject to “cancellation or return”. The aforementioned consideration has not been received with the same degree of acceptance by experts in the subject and the cooperative movement. The main argument in opposition to this consideration is that it jeopardises the survival and economic viability of this type of companies, as their financial statements would make them look like insolvent companies without the ability to offer guarantees to third parties (particularly in the case of credit cooperatives). The Law on Cooperatives has finally been amended to include the possibility that there could be contributions by partners who conserve the right to recover their contributions when they leave, and contributions over which the company has the unconditional right to reject this recovery of the partners’ contributions, i.e. to deprive the partners of their right to recover their contributions. This means that a percentage of the share capital can no longer be claimed by the partners and becomes part of the cooperative’s equity, which distorts the essence of the cooperative societies from the financial point of view. From this perspective, the concept of the cooperative enterprise, especially associated labour cooperatives, and the employee-owned company come even closer together, given that until now the nature of their share capital has been the main difference between these types of enterprise. This study carries out a comparative analysis of associated labour cooperatives and employee-owned companies from the perspective of share capital, an increasing similarity being observed between the two types of company as their differences are becoming more limited.