October 9, 2018, Radisson Blu Beke Hotel, Budapest

We are excited to announce that registration for the 2018 Hungary General Counsel Summit is now open. The event will take place at Budapest’s Radisson Blu Beke hotel on October 9, 2018.

Former Squire Patton Boggs Hungary Managing Partner Akos Eros has moved to Wolf Theiss Budapest, bringing with him former Squire Patton Boggs Senior Associates Judit Nador and Artur Tamasi and Associate Agnes Budai.

CMS has acted with lead counsel Jones Day in advising the OTP Bank Group on its acquisition of Societe Generale subsidiaries SG Expressbank Group, Sogelife Insurance Company, and SG Banka Albania, for over EUR 600 million. Schoenherr's Sofia office and Kalo & Associates in Tirana advised Societe Generale on the sale.

Shortly after the expiry of the 9 June 2018 deadline, the Hungarian parliament has finally adopted the new act on the protection of trade secrets ("Trade Secrets Act") which will transpose the Trade Secrets Directive EU 2016/943 into national law.

The Hungarian Parliament has recently adopted legislation with the aim of harmonising the national data protection rules with the rules of the GDPR, and supplementing the national rules in areas not regulated by the GDPR. The Parliament adopted Act XXXVIII of 2018 ("Amendment") in an extraordinary session and the new regulations entered into force on 26 July 2018.

Schoenherr Hungary has welcomed back Attorney at Law Daniel Varga, who, after leaving the firm to join DLA Piper in 2015, re-joins to head its regulatory team in Budapest.

English lawyer Christopher Noblet has been based on Hogan Lovells' associated Budapest office since 2000 and leads its transactional and real estate team in Hungary. He studied law at King's Kollege London.

The Hungarian banking transaction tax drives market players and private individuals to use cash rather than electronic payment methods. Eighty per cent of all payment transactions were in cash last year. But extensive use of cash negatively impacts the economy in several ways, such as the high cost of maintaining a large cash volume, easier tax evasion and expansion of grey and black markets.

“The beginning of 2018 brought a comprehensive transformation of legal procedures in Hungary,” reports Andras Daniel Laszlo, Partner at Laszlo Fekete & Bagamery. “Procedural rules changed, from the most basic public administrative procedures, like renewing an ID or applying for a building permit, through commercial litigation and arbitration procedure, including also tax, and, as of July 1, criminal matters.”

Based on the transparency requirements of the GDPR, companies must now provide more detailed information on data processing. The usual form of relaying this information to the public is through a privacy notice. Now that May 25, 2018 is fast approaching and companies are working towards GDPR compliance, such privacy notices must be finalized.

On January 11, 2018, CEE Legal Matters reported that Dentons advised the London branch of UniCredit Bank AG and MUFG as coordinators on a EUR 750 million revolving credit facility provided by a group of 13 banks to MOL Plc, the Hungarian multinational oil and gas company. CMS advised MOL on the deal, which represented the largest financing deal in Hungary in 2017.

On the basis of current practice of the Hungarian tax authority, Hungarian taxpayers are not always able to recover value added tax they pay even the Court of Justice of the European Union had stated the possibility of VAT reclaiming.

The first Hungarian BIM Handbook has been prepared and published on the website of Lechner Tudásközpont on 22 June 2018, free of charge. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a new approach to design, construction and facility management, where the digital representation of the building process is used to facilitate the exchange and interoperability of information in digital format. BIM is beginning to change the way buildings look, the way they function and how they are designed and built.

Fighting against cartels has always been crucial to protecting fair competition and fostering economic growth. A proper leniency program is an important instrument for the competition authorities, allowing them to uncover and penalize such anticompetitive conduct.

The Hungarian Ministry of Justice proposed new bills on the freedom of assembly and the protection of privacy to the Hungarian Parliament on 26 June 2018.

The Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture (HCA) submitted a package of proposals to the Hungarian Parliament in June 2018 with the aim of improving the competitiveness of Hungarian agriculture.

While no more applications for Micro Projects (those below 0.5MW) can be submitted under Hungary’s very generous mandatory off-take system since the end of April 2018, the Government  seems to have acknowledged that the projects already licensed under the subsidy regime may not be physically implemented within the strict deadlines set forth in the original legislation. Therefore, it is now possible for entities that applied for licenses after January 1, 2016 to ask for a three- years extension to complete their projects without any sanction. This is good news for license-owners and potential investors, as they have a reasonable amount of time to manage the relatively burdensome permitting proceedings and can also secure project finance. This is also good news for the Hungarian state budget because the first heavy payments to the projects under the mandatory off-take system will be delayed by a few more years.

Several amendments to the Company Registry Act entered into force on 1 July 2018. The new provisions include a new information obligation for the legal representatives, meaning that in case of the indication of personal data in addition to the statutory data content of the company register, the legal representative must draw the attention of the natural person to the fact that his/her consent to include his/her natural data in the document means that such data will be available for the public.