Societas Europaea

Several of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index of leading eurozone companies have been registered as SE: Airbus, Allianz, BASF, E.ON, Fresenius, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (and its subsidiary Dior), SAP, Schneider Electric, TotalEnergies, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Vonovia.

[3][4] National law continues to supplement the basic rules in the Regulation on formation and mergers.

Formation of a joint subsidiary is available under the same circumstances to any legal entities governed by public or private law.

[6] The SE must have a minimum subscribed capital of €120,000 as per article 4(2) of the directive, subject to the provision that where a member state requires a larger capital for companies exercising certain types of activities, the same requirement will also apply to an SE with its registered office in that member state (article 4(3)).

The registered office of the SE designated in the statutes must be the place where it has its central administration, that is to say its true centre of operations.

The registration and completion of the liquidation of an SE must be disclosed for information purposes in the Official Journal of the European Communities.

Winding-up, liquidation, insolvency, and suspension of payments are in large measure to be governed by national law.

See also: Europa's collection of press releases, regulations, directives and FAQs on the European Company Statute.

In Germany, most large corporations are required to allow employees to elect a certain percentage of seats on the supervisory board.

These differing traditions of worker involvement have held back the adoption of the statute for over a decade.

The directive permits member states to not implement these default worker involvement provisions in their national law, but then an SE cannot be created in that member state if the provisions in the directive would apply and negotiations between workers and management are unsuccessful.

In terms of registrations, the Czech Republic is vastly overrepresented, accounting for 79% of all Societates Europaeae as of December 2015.

9 of the 50 constituents of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index of leading eurozone companies were Societates Europaeae in 2015.