Introduction

It is a particular honour to provide an essay in tribute to Eddy Wymeersch. Just ten years ago I was appointed, after over fifteen years without involvement in company law matters, as project director of the UK Company Law Review. Very shortly thereafter I received a generous invitation from Eddy (whom I had never met) to attend a very high powered international corporate law conference convened by him in Siena. The contrast between the European approach of fifteen years before and those discussions was remarkable: the former mechanical, ideological harmonization per se, with the law of one Member State at its core; the new approach scientific and openly comparative, heavily law-and-economics in style, and purposive, concerned for efficiency and economic welfare. Soon afterwards I found this now generally characterized Commission and Brussels work. The responsibility for that change lay very much with Eddy and a group of colleagues successfully dragging EU company law into enlightenment.

Two years later there emerged proposals at the highest political level, for opening up European law and related corporate service markets to free competition and restructuring. The objective was an efficient structure and financial base for European business, exposed to open market forces, with a view to global competitiveness – the right objective for our law of business organization.