9 Roll on the 14th Directive – Case law fails to solve the

‘Companies or firms formed in accordance with the law of a Member State and having their registered office, central administration or principal place of business within the Community shall, for the purposes of this Chapter, be treated in the same way as natural persons who are nationals of Member States.’ The recognition of companies under the differing theories of Company law among Member States has always served to potentially undermine one of the fundamental freedoms of EC law, freedom of establishment, to the extent of rendering it practically impossible for a legal person to move it’s registered office1 between some member states without liquidation and re-incorporation in the new state, no easy or simple task and one that gives rise to a range of taxation liabilities. Article 43 TEC (old Art 52) grants free movement of establishment to natural and legal persons, and Article 48 (old 58) quoted above clarifies this right and then goes on to state how a ‘company or firm ’ is to be defined under European law. Faced with this seemingly intractable problem, Freedom of Establishment has in certain cases remained a theoretical right only for some European companies