IKV organised a conference with the cooperation of Yeditepe University on EU Company Law on the 22^nd January 2015 at TOBB Plaza Conference Room.

The conference started with President of the Management Department at Yeditepe University Prof. Dr. Atilla Dicle’s opening remarks. Prof Dr. Dicle emphasized on the importance of company law, company mergers and takeovers and briefly presented Prof. Marco Ventoruzzo.

Prof. Marco Ventoruzzo is an expert in comparative company law and is a lecturer at the U.S. Penn State Law and Milan’s Bocconi University. He is the author of more than 50 books, articles and publications in Italian, English and French. Moreover, Ventoruzzo was part of the committee which organised Italy’s “Corporate Governance Law”. He also worked as a special legal adviser at Italy’s Stock Exchange between 2001 and 2008, contributed as to editor to numerous magazines and gave conferences and conferences in many different universities across the world such as Oxford, Hamburg, Fudan (China) and Bangalore (India).

Prof. Ventoruzzo explained in his speech that company law is developing rapidly and that it is an area where many different legal systems are merged. Moreover, Prof. Ventoruzzo stressed that in many EU countries, there is a trend of further harmonisation through directives although diverse rules and applications at national level continue to persist. As an example, Prof. Ventoruzzo alluded to the governance rules in Italy. Indeed, he pointed out that there is a rule which gives an opportunity for minority shareholders to be represented in the board of directors and that such rule did not currently exist in other EU countries. Prof. Ventoruzzo gave further comprehensive information on the formation of the board of directors of companies.

Later, Prof. Ventoruzzo gave information regarding “insider trading” and related criminal and administrative sanctions. As such, he pointed out that in accordance with the principle of “ne bis in idem” (double jeopardy), an individual may not be prosecuted for the same crime twice. Moreover, he gave further details on the real seat theory and related practices, the status of minority shareholders, mergers and takeovers rules and mandatory bid rule.

Along with academicians, officials from the Ministry of EU Affairs, lawyers, members of the media and experts participated to the conference.