German Subsidiaries in Portugal: Employees’ rights to vote and stand as candidates for the supervisory board of the parent company

SÉRVULO PUBLICATIONS 13 Sep 2017

(European Union Court of Justice (“ECJ”) of 18 July 2017[1]) 

In this ruling, the ECJ decided that Articles 18[2] and 45[3] of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union[4] had to be interpreted as not precluding German legislation, which provides that the employees of a group of companies employed in subsidiaries located in the territory of other Member States do not have the right to vote and to stand as candidates in elections for workers’ representatives for the supervisory board of the parent company of the group (located in Germany).

This decision is not only relevant to German, but also to Portuguese Law, since it covers similar situations in which parent companies have headquarters in Germany and subsidiaries in other countries, herein including Portugal.