News-Archive

The corona crisis not only affects companies, but also has an impact on the operation of public authorities. In the opinion of the German legislator the German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) cannot conduct investigations or cannot do so within the usual timeframes, as companies are apparently not responding to the authority's inquiries or are responding with a considerable delay.

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Oppenhoff has recruited the financial law expert Dr. Wolfgang Kotzur for the expansion of its banking and capital markets law practice. He is transferring from Simmons & Simmons and previ-ously worked for ten years as a solicitor for two large international law firms in London as well as for three years in Frankfurt.

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Short-time work has become a crucial corporate instrument to counter the temporary loss of work due to the Covid 19 pandemic. But what happens if there are signs of a further decline in work that can no longer be countered by short-time work alone? Does short-time work rule out the possibility of dismissals for operational reasons? Does a dismissed employee automatically drop out of the short-time work scheme? And could the employment agency even be entitled to repayment or damage claims?

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Engineering companies with customers all over the world are facing the same problems as a result of the Covid-19 crisis: Corona has brought important projects to a standstill shortly before completion. Either it is not possible to finish assembling plants at customers abroad, to make them available for commissioning, or to carry out the final inspection and approval – so-called “acceptance” (“Abnahme”) - of plants that have already been fully installed because staff are unable to travel abroad. In many cases, remote support offers an alternative way for companies to remain involved and to provide instructions or explanations.

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30 April 2020 – Our partner Markus Rasner on unternehmervertraute.de

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Little attention has been paid to employee participation to date in the context of the corona pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis. Employee participation offers various possibilities to provide the company with liquidity or to reduce wage expenses, and at the same time to create an incentive to increase the company’s success beyond the mere preservation of jobs.

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In its social protection package, the legislator had included a new provision in § 14 (4) of the German Working Hours Act [Arbeitszeitgesetz – ArbZG] which makes it possible in exceptional emergencies with a nationwide impact, particularly in epidemic situations of national significance, to permit changes for certain work of employees for a limited time period as exceptions to the existing working time regulations.

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On 22 April 2020, the governmental coalition agreed to increase short-time work compensation. This and further current changes concerning the receipt of short-time work compensation illustrate the current relevance of short-time work as an instrument of labor market policy.

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The “Corona Cabinet” of the Federal Government and federal states has announced new temporary regulations for containing Covid-19. During the concrete implementation of these regulations, many questions have arisen for the trade, which have also reached the Association of the German Nursery Products Industry [Bundesverband Deutscher Kinderausstattungs-Hersteller e.V. – BDKH]. Lioba Hebauer talked to the Cologne lawyers Dr. Daniel Dohrn and Jörn Kuhn of Oppenhoff & Partner about this.

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Works council meetings, economic committee and conciliation board via video and telephone conference

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