Corporate Law (Austria)

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The corporate law designated in Austria as objective law all standards that appeal to entrepreneurs set up. Until the commercial law reform in 2007 through the Commercial Law Amendment Act (HaRÄG), the area of ​​law was called commercial law .

history

The General Commercial Code has been in force in Austria since the 19th century . After the annexation to the German Reich, the German Commercial Code was introduced in 1938 and came into force in 1939. However, since the Austrian General Civil Code (ABGB) remained in effect and was not replaced by the German Civil Code , the dHGB and the ABGB did not harmonize. This deficiency was corrected by the 4th Commercial Law Introductory Ordinance (4th EVHGB), whereby the German legislator integrated relevant provisions from the dBGB into the HGB. The HGB was not adapted to the ABGB, but rather the other way around. Until recently, individual commercial law provisions were therefore not entirely compatible with the system of the ABGB.

Until 2007 commercial law was the special private law of merchants . With a large commercial law reform is now said goodbye to the complicated Kaufmann term and HGB by the Commercial Code replaced (UGB). The 4th EVHGB was repealed entirely. The UGB came into force on January 1, 2007. From now on, company law applies to everyone who runs a company. In this way, the scope of application is considerably expanded and also simplified, since the type term “businessman” was sometimes very complicated, casuistic and too narrow. Correspondingly, there is increasing talk of company law as a central legal matter.

In particular, the position as an entrepreneur is no longer limited to the classic area of ​​trade and industry, but is also accessible to members of the liberal professions and farmers, for example. The term entrepreneur, as it has already been used in other legal norms, such as consumer protection law or tax law, remained formally unaffected. Nonetheless, the definition of entrepreneur and company set out in Section 1, Paragraphs 1 and 2 of the Austrian Commercial Code (UGB) will also show effects outside of actual entrepreneurship law by way of interpretation.

literature