What changes has the new Belgian Companies Code 2019 brought? As mentioned above, the legislator’s intention was to modernise and simplify Belgian corporate law. All in all, as far as I am concerned, this has not resulted in any particularly revolutionary, changes to company law. Nevertheless, some changes are quite significant in practice. For example, a major change was the abolition of the concept of minimum share capital in the private limited company (BV/SRL). The requirement to actually pay up capital at the time of incorporation has also been abolished. On the one hand, this removes some in order to modernise and simplify company law. The new code limited the number of company forms and provided a more flexible framework. One consequence was that existing companies had to revise their articles of association to comply with the new law by 31 December 2023. According to the Belgian Federation of Notaries, at the end of April 2023, around two-thirds of existing companies still had to comply, which led to a rush on notaries in (especially) the last quarter of 2023. It can be assumed that many companies will not meet the deadline of 31 December 2023 (which, incidentally, will not immediately lead to sanctions, but possibly to the invalidity of certain clauses of the articles of association). WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM 19 Michael Boudry Partner at Novius Overall, therefore, Belgium can be said to have a fairly favourable business environment.
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