Marketing authorization holders have three years from 17 May 2023 to remove any “negative formulations” from their existing and future medicines packaging.
On 4 May 2023, Royal Excelsior Virton, a professional football club in Belgium’s second division, announced that it lodged a complaint against competing club SK Lommel with the European Commission under the new Regulation 2022/2560 on foreign subsidies distorting the internal market (“FSR”). This appears to be the first time the Commission is publicly asked to initiate an ex officio investigation under the FSR.
Undertakings that habitually employ on average at least 50 employees will have to hold so-called ‘social elections’ in May 2024. The preparatory procedure for this year will begin in December 2023. The average headcount is determined over a reference period of one year running from Q4 2022 through Q3 2023. The specific category of interim agency workers is also taken into account for determining the average headcount, be it only in function of their employment in Q2 2023. To that effect, employers in Belgium need to keep a special register.
At the beginning of this year, the European Parliament proposed certain amendments with respect to the EU initiative to target so-called “shell” entities (i.e., entities which are considered to be devoid of economic substance). The European Commission published already in 2021 a proposal for an EU Directive intended to neutralize the misuse of such shell entities in the EU for tax purposes (also known as “ATAD 3” or “Unshell Directive”). The tax world raised, however, a lot of concerns regarding this initiative and such in particular in light of the many uncertainties on how to interpret the proposed text.
To enhance the fight against VAT fraud in the field of cross-border e-commerce transactions, Belgium has adopted on 23 March 2023 the law requiring payment service providers to keep detailed records of transactions involving online merchants and pass them on to the Belgian tax authorities.
On 22 March 2023, the European Commission tabled a proposal for a Directive on substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims.
The proposal aims to harmonize the evaluation and monitoring of voluntary environmental claims – often referred to as “green claims” – towards EU consumers and control the proliferation of public and private environmental labels. Complementing the March 2022 proposal for a Directive on empowering consumers for the green transition as a lex specialis by providing more specific requirements on the substantiation, communication and verification of green claims, it contributes to the fight against “greenwashing”.
The Belgian Financial Services and Markets Authority has introduced stricter rules for commercializing virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin or Ether, among consumers in Belgium. Among others, advertisements must contain the disclaimer “Virtual currencies, real risks. The only guarantee in crypto is risk.” In addition, mass advertising campaigns to more than 25,000 people must be notified to the regulator 10 days in advance.
Since the decisions of the European Court of Justice in the so-called “Danish cases”, passive income streams are being scrutinized more than ever across Europe. This is not different in Belgium, where we have seen a substantial increase in tax audits focusing on passive income streams where withholding tax is being claimed also in the framework of business-driven structures.
On 23 October 2019, the European Parliament and the Council adopted Directive (EU) 2019/1937 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law, informally referred to as the “EU Whistleblower Directive”.
Belgium has implemented the EU Whistleblower Directive separately for the public and the private sectors, with the Act of 8 December 2022 on reporting channels and protection of whistleblowers in federal public sector bodies and the integrated police, and the Act of 28 November 2022 on the protection of whistleblowers of breaches of Union or national law established within a legal entity in the private sector, published on 15 December 2022, which came into effect on 15 February 2023.
The Belgian act implementing EU Directive 2019/1937 (“Whistleblower Act”) requires legal entities in the private sector to establish channels and procedures for internal reporting and follow-up of reports in specific areas. In this context, the Whistleblower Act established a particular method to calculate the employee headcount within the legal entity with reference to the Belgian legislation on the social elections. However, there has been some uncertainty about how this reference should be applied in the context of the Whistleblower Act.