The agricultural sector in the European Union is facing an increasing number of legal and regulatory challenges, in contexts which are genuinely multidisciplinary.

In The Corner Office we ask Managing Partners across CEE about their unique roles and responsibilities. The question this time around: How do you do performance reviews, and how important are they to the planning and management of the firm?”

Andras Levai is the Head of Legal-CE Ethics and Compliance at Tesco Central Europe. Levai, who is based in Hungary, has been with Tesco since June 2009, when he joined as Senior Legal Counsel. In 2013, he was appointed to the role of Group Internal Auditor for Hungary and Turkey and he became the Head of Legal for Hungary in 2014. He was appointed to his current role in 2016. Prior to Tesco, he worked at the Hidasi & Partners Law Firm.

Andras Mohacsi is the Head of Competition Law and Sanctions at British American Tobacco, where he is responsible for designing, rolling out, and coordinating the implementation of the company’s global competition law and sanctions compliance programs, as well as overseeing the management of any related proceedings against any group company. He first joined BAT in Hungary in 1998. Before that, he worked as Head of Legal of Daewoo Bank Hungary.

Starting or continuing a mining project has always been subject to various licensing requirements. However, an amendment to spatial planning laws that became effective on March 15, 2019 increases the regulatory challenges faced by investors by introducing a completely new condition for obtaining the local municipality’s blessing, even for operations that are already underway. Therefore, the aftermath of the most recent regulatory changes should not be underestimated, as the number of mining sites exceeds 800 in Hungary.

Competition/Antitrust expert Sam Baldwin is a British national in Budapest’s Szecskay Attorneys at Law. Before joining Szecskay he spent eight years as an attorney in Copenhagen with the Gorrissen Federspiel law firm. He has significant experience advocating before national competition authorities and the European Commission and is successful at fending off accusations of wrong-doing on behalf of clients. He has represented companies in national court proceedings as well as at the General Court and European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

In January 2019 CEE Legal Matters reported that Deloitte Legal had advised K&H Bank on long-term non-recourse project financing provided to Photon Energy Group for Photon Energy’s 11.5 MWp proprietary PV power plant portfolio in Hungary. Pontes Budapest advised Photon Energy on the deal. We reached out to both firms for more information.

The number of electric vehicles in Hungary is rising. In response to this, the National Building Regulation of Hungary (OTEK) has established new requirements for the provision of recharging points, with a January 1, 2019 deadline. Although these new rules have had some visible results, there is significant delay in establishing full compliance. Those who fail to meet the requirement may anticipate the imposition of penalties.

The Hungarian Government is considering creating new legislation to cover all kinds of insolvency proceedings, including bankruptcy, liquidation, winding-up, and dissolution proceedings. This move has been roundly welcomed, especially by creditors, as the current law is from 1991, and although it has been amended numerous times, it counts as an outdated and much-criticized piece of legislation.

In honor of CMS Budapest’s 30-year anniversary – the Pearl anniversary, formally, in the city often called the Pearl of the Danube – we reached out to several of the prominent partners to learn a bit more about the changes they’ve seen over the years, and the practices they manage.

As a first-generation lawyer I did not have a profound career perspective when I graduated from law school in the early ‘90s. I saw a job ad in a newspaper – “International law firm looks for junior lawyers” – and even though I had no clue what an “international law firm” was, I had nothing to lose, so I thought it would be worth seeing how a real job interview worked. In the end I was selected and I decided to stay … and I have never regretted that decision.

The automotive industry is facing several changes that will shape the future of mobility and production. The car of the future will be electric, connected, and automated, and it will provide benefits for individual consumers and society as a whole. One major message of the recent Automotive in Transition Conference in Budapest was that the automation revolution is bringing challenges, but it is also bringing new opportunities for Hungary to emerge stronger from the transition process.

In The Corner Office we ask Senior and Managing Partners across Central and Eastern Europe about their unique roles and responsibilities. The question this time around: “What is the one skill, ability, or characteristic that fresh law school graduates in your country most commonly lack?”

In recent years, a principal aim of Hungary’s energy strategy has been to make the country self-sufficient in electric energy. In figures, this means reducing the import to 0% within ten years – as the country’s current dependency on import of approximately 30% is significantly above the EU average. The increasing price of gas and the decreasing price of electricity led to a decrease in the domestic production of natural gas, so the Hungarian energy policy had to turn to alternatives.

The 2019 Hungarian tax law changes, among other measures, have introduced a new group taxation regime and reflect the implementation of the provisions set out in the European Union’s Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive (ATAD). 

The new Hungarian Code of Civil Procedure (the “Code”) came with a number of ambitious promises, many of which have already been addressed in CEE Legal Matters. However, a prominent promise, namely increasing the transparency and predictability of litigation, has not yet been discussed in these pages.

On September 11, 2018, CEE Legal Matters reported that Akos Eros, the Managing Partner of Squire Patton Boggs in Hungary, had taken a team from that international firm to join Wolf Theiss, led in Budapest by his old friend Zoltan Faludi. The reunion of these two actual comrades-in-arms is a source of real excitement at Wolf Theiss Hungary, which is embracing the changing legal market of the moment with confidence and style.

The Hungarian Competition Authority has launched the public consultation process about the draft of its updated and amended communication concerning commitment decisions in Hungarian competition cases.