Guest article: The cooling-off period for the supervisory board needs to be reviewed
Attracting good supervisory board members has become very difficult for the corporations. Today's requirements can no longer be compared to those of 2009, says Christoph Zeiss.
2009 was a pivotal year for the German economy: In the midst of the intense and lingering turbulence of the financial crisis shock, a corporate governance law was redesigned, which was to massively change the long-standing practice in German listed companies. Its core: Section 100 Paragraph 2 Number 4 of the German Stock Corporation Act (AktG), or colloquially the regulation on the cooling-off period.
From now on, a departing board member of a listed corporation could no longer join the supervisory board of the same company before two years had passed - with only one exception: if shareholders holding at least 25 percent of the voting rights proposed it. This has changed a lot. Was it right to take this legislative step? At the time, it probably was, especially for companies in the financial sector.
Germany's corporations were closely intertwined in their supervisory boards, sometimes too closely. It was customary for the outgoing CEO to become chairman of the supervisory board after his contract expired, which was not inherently and always bad, but rather had a negative effect in the overall context of the entanglements.
Translated by urgent.news. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
