Journal of Business Law 02/2025

The article is a voice in the discussion on the need to replace the nearly 59-year-old Act on Enforcement Procedure in Administration with a new codification of administrative enforcement proceedings. The author points out the basic flaws of the current legal regulation and attempts to answer some questions regarding new legal solutions: whether the codification of enforcement proceedings should be, as it has been so far, unified or two-track, what rank and title should be given to the act codifying this procedure, how the general principles of administrative enforcement proceedings should be shaped, what changes should be introduced in the scope of initiation and course of these proceedings, and also how the legal position of entities participating in these proceedings should be shaped.

The beneficiary, by signing the project contract, undertakes to ensure correct implementation of the project by preventing fraud. Therefore, it is necessary to verify the implementation of the project in terms of the occurrence of possible abuses or irregularities. The article presents the instruments and principles of verification of the correctness of spending of funds allocated for the implementation of cohesion policy, in particular in the context of the requirements arising not only from normative acts, but also from soft law. The research carried out was aimed at analysing the principles of approximating the issue of detection and correction of irregularities in relation to the Guidelines in force in the current perspective – which has not yet been the subject of in-depth analysis and in this respect this article fills the research gap. The subject of the study also included the issue of calculating the amount of financial correction, due to the numerous doubts about the issue in question arising in practice. The author, using the dogmatic-legal and legal-comparative methods, sought answers to the question of how to protect the implementation of projects from possible irregularities, as well as how to recover improperly spent funds. The above issues are of particular importance in the context of imposing financial corrections, as the rules for imposing corrections have undergone certain modifications, which was presented by comparing the current financial perspective to the previous one (2014–2020).

The entry into force of China's Personal Data Protection Law on 1 November, 2021 created a statutory comprehensive data protection system from the existing patchwork of regulations, including cross-border personal data transfers. China's PIPL has been considered as one of the most stringent data privacy laws in the world. Indeed, despite its apparent inspiration from the European GDPR, it contains solutions for cross-border data transfers that are unknown to it and much more demanding. However, the latest Regulation of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on Promoting and Regulating Cross-border Data Flows which were announced and entered into force on 22 March 2024, liberalize the rules for transfers of personal data outside China. It introduces exceptions to cross-border data transfer mechanisms similar to derogations under the GDPR. They also reduce the volume of personal data which, when exceeded, requires the use of certain transfer mechanisms. The amendment simplifies the rules for transferring data outside China by foreign companies operating also in China and by Chinese exporters. Its purpose is, among others, facilitating cross-border e-commerce, cross-border payments, and transferring employee personal data abroad within corporate groups. The topic of the article is Chinese data transfer regulations and their comparison to GDPR from a normative perspective.

The few legal actions for which the cooperative's management board must obtain the approval of another body of the cooperative – its general meeting – include adopting resolutions on joining and leaving other economic organizations. It is not clear whether this category of activities also includes concluding agreements regarding the purchase or sale of shares in capital companies due to the provisions of Art. 38 § 1 point 6 of the Cooperative Law Act, an ambiguous concept of "economic organization". The article attempts to outline the framework of this concept using linguistic and systemic interpretation methods, as well as its reference to capital companies.

The main subject of the paper is Article 17f of the Act of 16 April 1993 on Combating Unfair Competition – a central regulation for Polish law in terms of preventing and combating unfair competition. This provision formulates a new type of act of unfair competition introduced to the above-mentioned Act in 2017 as part of the legislative agenda aimed at facilitating debt recovery. The purpose of the publication is to analyse Article 17f taking into account its specific regulatory environment created by the provisions of the Act of 9 April 2010 on sharing business information and exchange of business data. The paper focuses on the assessment of the mutual relation of the two Acts on the one hand, and on the other hand on the examination of the very construction of Article 17f within the normative structure of the Act of 1993. From the theoretical perspective this new regulation raises questions concerning the tendencies affecting the development of Polish law in the discussed area, including the consistency of legislative actions as exemplified by the introduction of successive types of acts of unfair competition.

The subject-matter of the article is the analysis of the draft directive on the harmonization of transfer pricing in the EU, submitted by the European Commission on 12 September 2023. The assumptions of the European Commission's proposal were discussed from the perspective of the main challenges characteristic of transfer pricing, the area of income taxes, i.e. the lack of coherence of legal provisions on an international scale, and the essential role of subjective expert judgment in applying in practice the basic legal norm of transfer pricing - the arm's length principle. The aim of the elaboration is to demonstrate that the harmonization of transfer pricing regulations in the EU will improve the situation related to inconsistency of legal provisions, but does not contain sufficient tools to prevent tax disputes between taxpayers and tax administrations arising as a result of the basic challenge of transfer pricing: the subjective nature of the valuation of transactions between related entities for tax purposes.

The subject of the gloss is a commentary on the judgment of the European Court of Justice of 8 May 2024 in case C-20/23. It is critical in nature. The judgment was based on the interpretation of Article 23(4) of Directive 2019/1023 (the so-called Preventive Restructuring Directive, "PRD"). The Court held that the discharge of debt in the context of bankruptcy proceedings of an entrepreneur who is a natural person does not have to be absolute. According to the ECJ, the national legislator has the possibility to exclude certain specific categories of claims from the principle of debt discharge, including claims such as tax and social security claims. However, the granting of privileged status to such debts must be duly justified under national law. The gloss focuses on criticisms of the ECJ's judgment. Firstly, because the Court failed to indicate what conditions must be met in order for the exclusion of a given claim from the debt relief rule to be considered "duly justified" within the meaning of the PRD. Secondly, the Court failed to show that public-law debts should be excluded from the debt relief rule by virtue of their public nature and should therefore enjoy absolute priority.