Introduction

It is a great pleasure to contribute to this liber amicorum in honour of Eddy Wymeersch. His vast and seemingly unlimited interest in company and securities law offered an equally broad choice of subjects for this article. Working with a team of researchers in Tilburg's Center for Company Law on a broader project aiming at revealing the basic elements and guiding principles of reform of company and enterprise law, I decided to carve out from this project some observations on the intended introduction of a statute for European Private Companies.

The idea for an EPC is not new. Shortly after publication of the first draft for the SE Statute, Mme Boucourechliev published her ‘Pour une SARL Européenne’. Together with Drury, Hommelhof inter alia, she was involved in drafting a proposal that was published by CREDA/Medef in 1998. The High Level Group of Company Law Experts reiterated the case for an EPC and the EC in its 2003 Action Plan and gave it a mid-term priority. In 2006 a consultation document was published focusing on the scope and nature of an EPC statute: (a) should it be available to single-owned firms and quasi-partnerships or also to private firms with ‘dispersed’ ownership?; (b) should the statute be standalone and exhaustive or – like the SE statute – build on and refer to national law?