In the summer of 2008, the EU Commission will present the draft regulation for a European private company. The Commission indicates by this announcement of the internal market commissioner, after prolonged hesitation that it wishes to comply with the urgent and detailed request of the European Parliament (EP) and to initiate the legislative process. Apparently, the arguments directed at the small and medium sized enterprises (SME) and their specific interests have now, after the EU parliamentarians, also convinced the Commission. In fact, the significance of this group of enterprises in the economy of the Community cannot be overestimated. The Commission therefore acts with appropriate responsibility in not confining itself to taking up the draft regulation prepared ten years ago by business practitioners and academic lawyers (CCIP/CNPF working group) but being prepared (as can be seen in the Consultation Paper of the General Directorate Internal Market of July 2007) to develop its own statute for a European private company. This paper is intended, mainly on the basis of that Consultation Paper but also on the basis of the EP resolution, to introduce the main issues and central regulatory elements of the new legal form of community law.

German corporate group law (or rather, to be more precise, the German Recht der verbundenen Unternehmen, i.e., the law of affiliated companies, §§ 15 ff., 291 ff. Marketable Share Company Act [Aktiengesetz, abbreviated AktG]) owes its existence to special concerns of the German legislature at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s regarding the ability to protect the interests of outsiders in group-dependent marketable share companies (Aktiengesellschaften). The interests of shareholders and creditors were considered to be so intensive, so inscrutable and so continuously endangered, that the legislature believed that the existing company law was incapable of satisfactorily providing the requisite protection.