The International Relations Committee brings you soccer-themed round up of European useful links.
England were (not unsurprisingly) eliminated from the Euro 2012 football competition this week – another penalty shoot out deciding the team’s fate. Still, Wimbledon is now under way, and we’ve got the Olympics coming up – literally on our doorstep here in the City of London – so there is plenty of summer left for us Brits to get our fix of sport. We thought a few links to useful resources from the teams still in the soccer tournament might be of interest – so here’s a round up of some key legal sites that might help with queries (or not!) about the remaining Euro 2012 countries or the Olympic games.
The European Union publishes short guides to each country’s legal system – a good place to start.
Portugal
https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_member_state_law-6-pt-en.do?member=1
Italy
https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_member_state_law-6-it-en.do?member=1
Spain
https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_member_state_law-6-es-en.do?member=1
Germany
https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_member_state_law-6-de-en.do?member=1
The amount, currency and quality of freely available local information varies between individual companies. I’d say I have a 50:50 hit rate obtaining a case or a piece of legislation for free in the searches I have run. Other sources include Lexis.com and academic libraries – I’ve used the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies to obtain documents in the past.
Company information is available either via agents for the European Business Register or individual country directories. Google Translate may be your friend when negotiating European business registers, there is little consistency between countries about what is available and what is searchable online independently.
Portugal – you can register a company online here http://www.portaldaempresa.pt/CVE/pt/EOL but obtaining documents via http://www.irn.mj.pt/sections/inicio/ seems to be difficult.
Spain – the companies’ register can’t be searched outside a subscription service in any detail – the site is at http://www.rmc.es/InfGeneral.aspx?lang=en.
Italy – I have never managed to obtain anything useful directly from http://www.infocamere.it/eng/about_us.htm so have generally resorted to agents.
Germay – details are here https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/?submitaction=language&language=en
This PDF provides indicative pricing and availability for EU countries’ company information… http://www.gbrdirect.eu/GBRDirect%20Pricelist.pdf , other agents are available (see also http://www.7side.co.uk/moreinfo/International_Registry_and_Documents_Service.pdf from UK agents 7Side)
If you want to know more about the Olympics, the official site is at http://www.london2012.com/ and the BBC’s getting geared up over at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/2012/
Wishing you a happy summer of sport,
Sara Batts
International Relations Chair
