Legal news

The hand-to-hand gift is a well-known concept in Belgium and France, but the term does not cover the same reality in the two countries, and the tax consequences are not the same. The French and Belgian Civil Codes define a gift as a contract by which, during his lifetime, a person (the donor) immediately and irrevocably transfers ownership of...

Belgium has always been known as a tax paradise because of its lack of a capital gains tax, at least if the capital gains were made within the “normal management of a private estate”. Capital gains realised by individuals on shares in companies and other financial instruments were simply tax exempt. That was very attractive for investors who...

French M&A transactions may require one of two employee-related procedures before the seller can enter into a binding sale agreement : direct notification of employees under the so-called Hamon Law, or information and consultation of the target’s work council (comité social et économique, or CSE). Neither route gives employees or the CSE a...

In 2020, the Human Rights League filed a class-action complaint with the CNIL on behalf of 170 Uber drivers. The company comprises UBER B.V., headquartered in Amsterdam, and UBER TECHNOLOGIES INC., based in San Francisco, U.S. Under the one-stop-shop mechanism, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) handled the complaint in close cooperation...

Since 1 January 2025, twelve Commercial Courts (« Tribunaux de Commerce ») have been converted into Economic Activity Courts (« Tribunaux des Activités Économiques » abbreviated as « TAE ») on a pilot basis for four years [4], covering particularly Paris, Nanterre, Lyon and Marseille. This reform comes with a major new feature : the Contribution to...

On July 7, 2026, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) adopted a draft of new guidelines on anonymization (“Guidelines”) [7]. These Guidelines aim to update Opinion 05/2014 of the Article 29 Working Party on anonymization techniques, in order to take into account developments “in the legal, privacy, engineering and technological landscapes”....