The purpose of this paper consists of giving an overview of the way company laws in some European states have been dealingwith the dividing line between closely held companies limited by shares, and those that have gone public or have widely distributed shares. It analyses whether a case can be...

Shareholders call for more attention after the crisis: confidence will have to be restored to convince them to recapitalise the financial firms. Five topics are addressed here: shareholders should be able to effectively exercise their rights, especially their voting rights. They should be...

Section I: The Broad Picture1 Is the European Union going to help us overcome the COVID-19 crisis (Danny Busch)2 COVID-19 and European banks: no time for lawyers (Wolf-Georg Ringe)3 The COVID-19 crisis and financial regulation (Eddy Wymeersch)4 Culutral reforms in Irish banks. Walking the walk...

The relationship between corporate governance and financial stability is an intermediate one. Firms have no obligation to take financial stability into account except when the law or the applicable regulation imposes it. In several fields this is the case: regulation of auditors or credit rating...

The use of XML and its related languages especially XBRL in the financial markets is likely to raise much attention the next few years. Different projects are being studied: linkage of the business registers, remote access to the annual accounts, organising the distribution of the financial...

Standardisation techniques are used in a very broad range of financial transactions: technical standards, model contracts, codes of conduct, accounting rules, and even experiments with alternatives to European regulations. Especially in the financial services field, where mass production and...

This paper analyses the relationship between the EU Capital Requirements Directive and the proposed Solvency II directive and their application in the context of parent-subsidiary relations and the general rules on groups of companies, as these are applied in the Member States of the EU. Art 68...

Recently a new category of shareholders is manifesting itself: as activist shareholders they intervene in the actual running of the company, dictating its governance, determining its strategies, and often taking a very aggressive attitude against the incumbent management. Their action is...

As financial integration proceeds, new issues are coming up in the field of supervision of financial markets. Some have to do with better cooperation among supervisors whether in the same field or on a cross-sectoral basis. The possibility to cooperate is however restricted by the public nature...