On 1 March 2021 a new Act on Labour Inspection, Employment Services and Grants will enter into force in Hungary, which replaces the "old" Act on Labour Inspection from 1996. While the new Act contains similar rules, there are some novelties too. Below we summarise the most important ones.

Products imported from and exported to the UK became subject to customs duties as the UK withdrew from the European Union on 1 February 2020 and also left the EU customs union on 1 January 2021.

The hot practice for CMS in Hungary is Dispute Resolution, and Zsolt Okanyi, Partner and Head of Dispute Resolution both for Hungary and globally at CMS, explains that his team's current workload is primarily driven by the COVID-19 crisis.

The Kapolyi law firm has helped Connecticut-based international brokerage company Interactive Brokers establish its Central European headquarters in Budapest.

Every spring DLA Piper publishes its annual M&A intelligence report. This past spring, we could only speculate on the effects of the pandemic as COVID-19 had just hit Europe. Informed by our experience of the past few months, we have recently published our updated M&A Global Report. Below we highlight a couple of trends that are impacting CEE. 

Interview with the Partners of the New NGL Symbio Alliance.

New technologies are all the rage, as law firms adapt to the telecommuting and digitalization realities that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic. Accordingly, we decided to ask our Law Firm Marketing experts from across the region a simple question: “What is the single most important/valuable piece of software you use?” As always, we asked respondents to focus on the question at hand, rather than – as we put it – using the question simply as an excuse to “tell us that their firms are awesome.” Not everyone was able to resist.

In January 2021, Hungarian lawyer Gergely Juhasz launched Risque Finance Brokers – an independent financial services start-up offering risk management consulting services for the M&A sector.

Hungarian National Tax and Customs Authority regularly publishes the list of major tax defaulters for failing to fulfil their tax obligations in Hungary. The list also contains private data of the defaulters, including, inter alia, information on tax arrears and debts and their home address. In a recent case (L.B. v. Hungary – 36345/16), European Court of Human Rights concluded no violation and confirmed the approach of Hungarian tax authority as justified.

First reports under DAC6 were due recently from those who are parties to a cross-border transactions. Concurrently, at the last possible moment, the Hungarian Ministry of Finance published a Guide on certain issues related to the fulfilment of the reporting obligation. It is advisable, in particular, for accountants, consultants, lawyers and banks to carefully study this 38-page document, as any of them could easily fall within the scope of the reporting obligation.

At the beginning of February 2021, a new decree of the Hungarian Minister of Finance (“Decree”) was published on the detailed rules of the execution of the Money Laundering Act for certain non-financial service providers and the development and the minimum requirements of the operation of the filtering system. The decree enters into force on 19 March 2021.

In the last decade, the amount of minimum wage and the guaranteed minimum wage has been rising year by year. However, the process of determining the minimum wage in 2021 was different from previous years in two ways: firstly, the agreement on the wage, after 7 negotiation sessions, was not reached by the end of December 2020, therefore, after reaching agreement at the end of January 2021, the new minimum wage figures are in effect from 1 February 2021, and secondly, the increase was lower as seen before in the last years.

Act Ban & Karika has helped Swiss-based Elpro, a manufacturer of environmental monitoring solutions for pharmaceutical, life science, biotech, and health care industries, establish its Hungarian office and implement relevant GDPR compliance procedures. 

CMS has advised OTP Group affiliate OTP Mobile, a Hungarian online payment platform, on a FinTech cooperation agreement with Raiffeisen. 

“The hot topic in Hungary right now is the January 2021 amendments to the Code of Civil Procedure” says Komor Hennel Attorneys Managing Partner Ildiko Komor Hennel. “The act passed in the 1950s had one previous major overhaul back in 2017,” she says, adding that the recent amendments were necessitated by “modern times, technological updates, procedural effectiveness and business reality – just imagine not being able to file documents electronically!”

Hungarian lawyer Geza Nagy has joined LyondellBasell in the Netherlands as Compliance Officer.

Austrian lawyer Josef Holzschuster will be relocating from Budapest to Amsterdam, having been appointed Head of Legal, Markets DA at Philips, in which capacity he will lead the worldwide Legal Team for the Philips Domestic Appliances business, reporting to the General Counsel for DA, also located in Amsterdam.

Zoltan Lengyel, the current Managing Partner of the Allen & Overy Budapest office, has announced that he will retire on May 1, with Counsel Miklos Kadar taking over the management of the Budapest office from that date.