tag: COVID-19

It’s been almost a year since the obligation to report certain acquisitions of property by foreigners in Hungary was introduced. Since May last year, foreign persons can only acquire interest of a value exceeding one million EUR in strategic companies subject to reporting and the Ministry’s acknowledgement. Though at first, many had reservations regarding this authorisation obligation, which is based on the Italian practice and is one of the strictest regulations in Europe, by now it has become a concept integrated into the company acquisition market. We have summarised the experiences of the past one year.

We already know that Covid is changing the way we live and work. We’re keeping away from each other, we’re traveling less, we’re talking to each through video calls, and we’re working at home. But most of us haven’t thought about how these changes may affect the country our company pays taxes in.

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.

The healthcare emergency situation has accelerated the digitisation of tasks and processes in a wide range of areas. Enforcement proceedings based on notarial deeds are no exception, where an electronic procedure became mandatory a few months ago. The only question is how long the signature itself will still need to be in writing.

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.

Everything that used to be simple and straightforward when concluding or completing M&A transactions poses major challenges to market participants in today’s crisis circumstances. New legal and technical solutions have been designed to overcome these difficulties, some of which are expected to remain with us even after the crisis.

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.