Tax evasion is punishable. However, by tax amnesty the state waives punishment and gives tax dodgers the chance to return to honesty. The “Act To Promote Tax Honesty” offers people who evaded taxes between the years 1993 and 2002 an opportunity to wipe the slate clean by declaring their concealed income up to 2005. This offer applies to income tax, corporate tax, turnover tax, wealth tax, trade tax, inheritance tax, gift tax and tax deductions pursuant to the Einkommensteuergesetz (Income Tax Act). Amnesty participants must pay a reduced tax rate of 25 percent on declared income within ten days after the declaration. For income and corporate tax the assessment basis is reduced to 60 percent. Thereby the new law grants the repentant tax evaders a tax rate of 15 percent rather then usual up to 48 percent on the profits they gained in the past ten years.

On February 16th, 2004 the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) delivered a judgment concerning stock options for members of the supervisory board of Mobilcom AG, a major German telecommunications company organized as a stock corporation. As is well known, German stock corporations have a two-tier board, consisting of the management board and the supervisory board. This decision by the BGH sheds again a new light on the much discussed and much disputed management structure of German stock corporations. After this decision, there are now only limited ways in which members of the supervisory board may be compensated with stock options, if at all. In the near future, even these possibilities might be foreclosed by new regulation. The following comment will give a brief overview of the case, the reasoning of the Court, the law as it stands, and finally the law as it might become.

On 27 November 2003 a political agreement has been reached in the Council on the compromise proposal for the Takeover bids Directive. On 16 December, the Parliament gave its approval and the proposal has still to receive the formal voting of the Council under the Irish Presidency in March 2004. Member States are required to transpose it into national law by 2006. The Directive regulates how a company or an investor that already has control in a listed company or seeks to obtain control can acquire securities in that company and applies to both voluntary and mandatory bids.

I have had the privilege of serving as part of the team from Debevoise & Plimpton LLP headed by Donald Francis Donovan.1 The Debevoise team worked in close collaboration with the Director of the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, Sandra L. Babcock, and Mexican Ambassador Juan Manuel Gámez-Robledo and his foreign ministry staff to represent Mexico before the International Court of Justice.