| In Principle

Igor Hanas, an adwokat and partner at Wardyński & Partners who advises energy sector clients, will talk about changes in law affecting electricity prices, building nuclear power stations, and also onshore and offshore wind farms.

The newest episode of News from Poland—Business & Law focuses on Poland’s energy transition and especially offshore wind farms. Adrianna Ogonowska, attorney-at-law, who specialises in environmental protection issues associated with biodiversity and protection of the marine environment, will tell us about the legal aspects of such projects.
 

The European Union has addressed the issue of the impact of third countries, from outside the EU, on the operation of the single market. Next year, the Commission will begin investigating sources of money giving foreign undertakings an advantage, including in public procurement procedures. Subsidised contractors will not get public contracts in the EU if awarding them a contract could disrupt the EU market.

The upcoming amendment to the Labour Code on remote work is expected to comprehensively regulate a number of issues and relationships between employer and employee, significantly changing the existing legal landscape for performing work from home. The amendment also touches on issues of processing of personal data. Although work on the bill is still underway, it appears unlikely that the provisions discussed below will change significantly, so it is already worth taking a closer look at them.

Over the past decade, Polish lawmakers have taken many efforts to adapt the functioning of businesses in legal transactions to the current technological realities. We have witnessed the launch of electronic registration of companies, as well as the transfer of much of the National Court Register’s activity to the web. More changes are planned for the coming years.

Commercial partnerships, including limited partnerships, operate in principle on the basis of mutual trust and close cooperation between the partners. The composition of a limited partnership is most often fixed, but this does not mean that the partnership has to be dissolved whenever a partner decides to leave. There are several possibilities for a partner to withdraw from a limited partnership. Two of them are provided for expressly in the Commercial Companies Code, but they may prove inadequate to the dynamic needs of commercial practice. The third, non-code way of leaving a partnership, however useful, raises some doubts.

Modern tech solutions such as the software-as-a-service model, where users don’t have to maintain IT infrastructure on their own hardware, are becoming increasingly popular among taxpayers. But the fee for cloud solutions paid abroad may be subject to withholding tax if it is treated as a fee for use of an industrial device.

On VAT grounds, a merger may prove challenging for the acquirer if either the acquirer or the target applies proportional input tax deduction in the merger year.

The sale of shares in a real estate company is only the beginning, as the seller must face the VAT consequences of the transaction. Is the sale of shares in real estate companies treated differently under VAT than the sale of shares in other companies? Is this correct? And what can be done about it?

In November 2022, the leaves were falling from the trees to the rhythm of ESG. First, the European Parliament and then the Council of the European Union approved the draft Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Then the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group submitted the first set of draft European Sustainability Reporting Standards to the European Commission.

PFAS is a collective name for some 5,000 chemical compounds widely used in industry and everyday items. They have a harmful effect on the environment and human health. Recently, they have been the subject of intense research by the European Chemicals Agency and the US Environmental Protection Agency. This is reflected in the growing number of regulations restricting their use. However, awareness of the harmfulness of these compounds seems to remain low, as evidenced by the small number of court cases in this area.

10 December 2022 marked forty years since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which culminated years of negotiations within the United Nations, was opened for signature. With rapidly changing geopolitical conditions, the development of technologies enabling the extraction of minerals from the seabed, the climate crisis, and the disappearance of biodiversity, the convention must meet the demands of the next decades of the 21st century.