A Bill has been submitted to the Second Chamber extending the Act on the Collective Settlement of Mass Claims (WCAM) to bankruptcy situations.
The WCAM has been in force since 2005 and enables parties involved in mass claims to apply to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to declare a settlement binding on all class members. Well-known examples of this are the Court's decisions in DES and in Dexia. A recent decision in Converium shows that the WCAM may also apply to the settlement of mass claims involving a majority of foreign parties.
- Introduction
On 13 June 2012 legislation allowing the Dutch Central Bank or the Dutch Minister of Finance to intervene in respect of failing banks and insurance companies with seat in the Netherlands ("Intervention Act") came into force with retroactive effect from 20 January 2012.
On 13 June 2012 the Financial Institutions (Special Measures) Act (Wet bijzondere maatregelen financiële ondernemingen; "Intervention Act") entered into force with retro-active effect as of 20 January 2012). The Intervention Act includes new powers for the Netherlands Central Bank ("DNB") to procure that a bank or insurer which is experiencing serious financial problems is transferred, in whole or in part, to a third party.
Taking decisions to liquidate companies has become a matter of routine when optimising corporate structures to improve cost efficiency. Increasingly, we see that such decisions have been taken either prematurely or without taking all of the relevant factors into account.
In a recent case before the Court of Appeal in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the question was raised whether a liquidator should get access to data stored in a cloud, when the company, having a contractual relationship with the cloud provider, has gone into bankruptcy.
International structures as used by multinational companies typically could include limited partnerships or general partnerships. If the Netherlands is involved in these international structures, these partnerships may be set up in such a way that they qualify as transparent for Dutch tax purposes. Further, partnerships could be used to manage the recognition of taxable income (for example, the so called CV‐BV structures). ThisGT Alert may be helpful in further managing and controlling the tax risks within such structures.
In the October 2012 Newsflash, we informed you about the notion of “successive terms of employment” and the consequences associated herewith. We discussed the Dutch Supreme Court’s recent Van Tuinen decision, in which the Court limited the doctrine of successive terms of employment after insolvency by following the case law pertaining to the probationary period.