When Council Regulation (EC) No 2157/2001 on the Statute for a European Company (Societas Europaea – SE) became effective on 8 October 2004, it offered existing publicly traded companies, for the first time, a choice between competing company laws, namely the national law of the company's home state and the law of the supranational SE. Using an event study methodology, we analyse a unique dataset of publicly traded firms that have announced to re-incorporate under the SE Regulation.

The ECJ's Cartesio judgment should be understood as overriding the Daily Mail judgment of 1988. Under Daily Mail, Community rules governing freedom of establishment were waved away as not applicable, while in Cartesio they are merely not precluding national legislation controlling emigration. According to Cartesio, restrictions on transferring the centre of administration generally pass the test of compatibility. Nonetheless, in the authors' view, there should be no justification for sanctions of annulment or immediate dissolution of a company which has attempted to move its centre of administration to another Member State. In Cartesio, the ECJ proclaimed the right of companies to emigrate for the purpose of conversion into a company form of the host state. By analogy with SEVIC Systems, it seems that the host state may not refuse to give the immigré company permission to convert if similar conversion is open for local legal forms, unless justified by overriding requirements in the public interest. To sum up, the ECJ provides a complex method to determine and protect the freedom of companies to emigrate. Still, this method seems preferable to the other option: forcing Member States to tolerate emigration without regard to their legal tradition and the ensuing difficulties.

After a slow start, the European Company (Societas Europaea – SE) has become increasingly popular. Besides documenting the growth of this new company type, we examine whether firms choose to incorporate in the SE corporate form because they engage in ‘legal arbitrage’ by exploiting differences in legal rules between jurisdictions. We specify a number of hypotheses on particular legal arbitrage motives. To validate our hypotheses, we use a broad telephone survey among SE users in Germany as well as a simple country-level regression model based on a unique, hand-collected dataset on SE incorporations. We find strong evidence that firms use the SE to mitigate the effect of mandatory codetermination rules. Establishing a one-tier board structure (in jurisdictions that impose a two-tier structure on their national public companies) and taking advantage of the SE's mobility for tax purposes also seem to be driving SE formations. By contrast, our analysis fails to support the suggestion that firms use the SE to shop for the most favourable national company law to fill the gaps in the SE Regulation.

The European framework for creditor protection has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. While the ECJ's Centros case and its progeny have introduced free choice with respect to the State of incorporation, and hence the substantive company law regime, the European Insolvency Regulation has implemented uniform conflict of laws rules for insolvencies. However, this regime has opened up some forum shopping opportunities. This article analyzes possible consequences of regulatory competition and forum shopping for creditors and argues that the ‘insolvencification’ of corporate law creditor protection mechanisms will not enable national policymakers to impose their respective ideas about creditor protection on firms in a fully-fledged manner.

Europe has historically lagged behind the United States in viewing the primary role of company law as being to facilitate the operation of businesses in corporate form. In this respect, the report of the High Level Group of Company Law Experts (HLG) to the European Commission of November 2002 marks a distinct break with the past. In facilitative corporate law systems, disclosure is a key mechanism for the regulation of corporate governance agency problems. This paper questions the merits of singling out directors' disqualification as a pan-European sanction for the enforcement of corporate governance disclosure requirements. It argues that a more effective strategy for promoting consistency in enforcement could be to pay closer attention to the institutional allocation of regulatory responsibilities for corporate governance disclosure. It suggests a model in which responsibility for the monitoring and enforcement of corporate governance disclosure is located with securities regulators. Making securities regulators the primary regulators of corporate governance disclosure would promote pan-European consistency in monitoring and enforcement. Looking beyond disclosure to the actual exercise of internal control by shareholders, this paper also casts a sceptical eye over the HLG's views on the need for urgent EC intervention to address the problem of investor disenfranchisement. British market participants have made ingenious use of proxy mechanisms to ensure that underlying investors retain control over the exercise of voting rights attached to shares held on their behalf by nominees. This evidence suggests that the case for EC company law intervention to address problems that the market has proved unable to solve is weak. While the situation may be different in other Member States, the existence of such differences militates against top-down EC intervention.