Franchising may be an attractive proposition for many companies wishing to expand internationally. Take a look at this overview to discover the applicable franchise law in Romania, covering the essentials for franchisors, the relevant areas of law, selected aspects such as fees, and dispute resolution and applicable law.

Contributed by Tuca Zbarcea & Asociatii.

Uncertainty is the key word in Romania of late, according to Musat & Asociatii Deputy Managing Partner Paul Buta, with the Government recently succumbing to a vote of no confidence in Parliament impacting both businesses and law firms.

On 21 September 2021, the Commission launched a public consultation on the revision of the general pharmaceutical legislation. The public consultation ends on 21 December 2021. Any interested party may submit comments and observations. The consultation concerns certain key topics such as access and affordability, solutions to address unmet medical needs, incentives for innovation, medicine shortages, environmental challenges and sustainability. The amendments of the general pharmaceuticals legislation may be however much wider in scope, in line with the strategic areas identified in the Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe, as part of which the public consultation is organized. Following the consultation process, the Commission will adopt a final legislative proposal, which is expected to be published by the fourth quarter of 2022.

Until November 2021, crowdfunding activities (investment-based or lending-based) have not benefited from a dedicated regime and may interfere with the EU banking and financial services rules, triggering ultimately significant risks to all parties involved.

 In “The Corner Office” we ask Managing Partners at law firms across Central and Eastern Europe about their backgrounds, strategies, and responsibilities. With summer having just passed, the question this time: What is your one favorite yearly activity to disconnect?

In the late Summer of 1984, while hanging out in Bucharest one evening, a university friend and I decided (with the help of some local red wine) to go “look for Dracula.” Full of adventure and certainly educational, the experience was not a positive one. Due to the harsh policies of the Ceausescu regime at the time, Romania was a dark place (there were literally few if any lights during the evenings), with little food to eat (even for foreigners like us), and a local population who would rarely, if ever, talk to us (unbeknownst to us at the time, the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, required anyone who had contact with a foreigner to report the interaction – needless to say, this was not conducive to long and meaningful conversations).

In 1874, a French writer, forerunner of science-fiction literature, named Jules Verne (1828-1905) wrote in his famous novel The Mysterious Island about a world where “water will one day be used as a fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen, which constitute it, used alone or simultaneously will provide an inexhaustible source of heat and light of an intensity that coal cannot have.” More than 110 years after his death, hydrogen is a hot topic in the global energy industry.

Romanian lawyer Anela Musat has joined Blue Horizon as its General Counsel in Zurich, Switzerland.

Four regulatory acts of interest to both employers and employees, were published in the Official Gazette.

Several measures related to the Labour Code and other employment legislation have been adopted by the Romanian Government and have immediate effect on employment relationships.

In the context that more and more people and companies are investing in cryptocurrencies and given the fact that non-cash payments are becoming the new standard in business transactions, the national legislator has intervened in order to offer a larger protection to these types of transactions, the legislative amendments being necessary in order to cover the full spectrum of electronic criminality.

Following intensive negotiations between the business community and the Romanian government, the Romanian parliament has issued a bill on the enforcement of a tax amnesty for tax liabilities, including late payment interest and penalties, imposed by the tax authorities following the reassessment of daily allowances as salary income.

The pandemic context and its economic implications prompted in 2020 and 2021 several legislative measures to alleviate fiscal burden both through tax facilities, such as amnesties or regulation of new cases and conditions for debt rescheduling, and through amendments concerning deductibility for tax purposes. This type of measures fall under the scope of the newly enacted Government ordinances nos. 8 and 11, published on August 31, 2021 in the Romanian Official Gazette.

Directly negotiated power purchase agreements with physical delivery (“PPAs”) have been a sensitive topic in Romania since 2012, when they were prohibited under the new energy law no. 123/2012 (the “Energy Law”) and continue to be a hot topic today, even though (long term) PPAs negotiated over the counter are expressly allowed under art. 3 (o) of Regulation (EU) 2019/943 (“Internal Market Regulation”), as they fall under the concept of “long term supply agreements”. This is mainly because Romania has stumbled over the last 2 years in reintroducing the directly negotiated PPAs back into the domestic legislation, in line with EU rules and EU market practice.

Being the country with the highest growth rates in the EU, Romania is going strong despite the global pandemic conditions, according to MPR Partners Co-Founder and Co-Managing Partner Alina Popescu.

European Directive no. 2019/904 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment was transposed into Romanian law as of 2 September 2021 by Ordinance no. 6/2021 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment (the “Ordinance”).

On 31 August 2021, Government Ordinances nos. 8/2021 and 11/2021, amending the Fiscal Code and the Fiscal Procedure Code, were published in the Official Gazette no. 832/31.08.2021.