The Legal 500

Energy News: October 2010 

In May 2011, the Serbian parliament adopted a new company law, which is scheduled to take effect on 1 February 2012 (hereinafter: the “New Company Law”). The new legislation will replace the current company law that has been in force since 2004 (hereinafter: the “Old Company Law”)

A practical cross-border insight into business crime

One of the most important facts to know in dispute resolution law is the local and mate-rial jurisdiction of courts with respect to the proceedings. Significant difficulties could arise if the petition is not brought before the right court, including cancellation of the judgement . As a result, a party should be aware of procedural rules and use them to his advantage, in particular if the dispute was decided by a body not authorised to do so.

Although the Office for Competition and Consumer Protection (OCCP) states that there shall be no mercy for competition law offenders, recidivists will be granted

The proposed future banking regulatory liquidity framework is widely regarded as favouring corporate bond issues as compared to corporate lending. The reasons for this are explained by Walter Gapp in his article in this roadmap.

In December 2010, the Slovak Parliament adopted an Amendment to the Renewable Energy Sources (RES) Promotion Act.

In recent decisions the Supreme Court has established an economic approach to the qualification of shareholders as consumers or entrepreneurs for the purposes of Section 1 of the Consumer Protection Act.

Since the beginning of 2010 the Commission for Protection of Competition has issued 25 clearance decisions on notification and five decisions in which it im-posed penalties for non-notification and premature implementation of concen-trations. Some of the commission's decisions issued on notifications are sum-marised below.

In the event of a public offer of securities, in order for the securities to be offered legally to investors, a prospectus must be prepared, approved by the competent authority and published. However, Article 4 of the EU Prospectus Directive (2003/71/EC) contains certain exemptions from the obligation to publish a prospectus. For several recent mergers in Austria (1) questions have arisen as to whether they constituted public offers of shares in the transferee companies and, thus, whether prospectuses should have been published.

The Parliament of Ukraine plans to adopt the new Labour Code (the Code) at the next plenary session starting mid-December. The Code will replace the long-standing and quite outdated Soviet Labour Code of 1971, as well as a number of other legal acts and regulations which currently supplement the Labour Code of 1971.