tag: contracts

When the idea of selling the company matures in the mind of a business owner, there’s still a long way to go before the company can be successfully sold. There are many legal and tax matters to be seen to as part of the process – and these should not be left to the last minute. We discuss a few of these here.

VAT can cause a lot of complications when it comes to interpreting our regular contracts. Does the purchase price include VAT if the parties have not explicitly stated so? Should a guarantee withholding be made from an amount that includes VAT? Does the stamp duty need to be paid on the gross or the net price of the property? These questions are particularly timely in light of the recent reduction in the VAT rate on newbuild homes: who stands to benefit from this – the builder or the apartment buyer?

Apart from all its other nasty effects, the coronavirus has shown how unprepared lawyers are. Not long after the outbreak of the virus, it became all too obvious that the “force majeure” clauses traditionally worded along Anglo-Saxon lines were not worth the paper they were written on: they simply weren’t suitable for addressing the kind of problems that were arising in the new situation. Based on what we’ve learnt over the past few months, however, it’s now a lot clearer how a “Covid-proof” contract should be drawn up.

To this day, the domestic legal system has remained silent on how contracts concluded by email should be treated. However, legislation recently adopted in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic explicitly allows communication via email between a company and its private-individual members. Could this be the first step towards a more comprehensive legal acceptance of emails?

With in-store shopping often relegated to a secondary role, online forms of trading have come to the fore of late. Nowadays, merchants that don’t adopt web commerce solutions alongside or instead of their physical stores can find themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the market. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that besides implementing various IT developments and having to organise home deliveries, running a webshop requires some major preparatory work in the legal area as well.

Panicking amid the health crisis, company managers can easily feel pressured to take some “seemingly obvious” legal or business measures to resolve their situation. However, these measures often involve serious legal risks and should be approached with caution.

Due to the state of emergency related to the coronavirus outbreak, sooner or later many business owners, company managers, and chief legal or financial officers will be relieved of their more routine, day-to-day work. This is a time when it might be worthwhile to sort out the company’s legal or financial issues that you may not have had time for during your day-to-day operations. Here are five tips worth considering.

The coronavirus outbreak is unfortunately having an impact on every aspect of our lives, and sets to affect a considerable number of businesses. For this reason we’ve summarised the five most important legal considerations that no business can afford to ignore at this time.