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This essay argues that, to address the Covid-19 crisis, in addition to creating a special temporary insolvency regime, relaxing provisions for companies in the vicinity of insolvency, and enabling companies to hold virtual meetings, policymakers should tweak company law to facilitate equity and debt injections and address the consequences of the extreme uncertainty firms are facing. After some general reflections upon the type of rules that are needed in these exceptional times, examples of temporary corporate law interventions for the emergency are provided. Specifically, rules to facilitate injections of equity capital and shareholder loans are suggested, together with relaxations of directors' liability rules and measures to protect firms against hostile takeovers. All of these measures should apply merely by default and only for so long as the emergency lasts. The essay concludes with some thoughts about how to make normal-times corporate law ready for similar emergencies in the future. The goal is both to reduce the risk that the temporary extreme measures enacted for this crisis are made permanent under the pretence that another crisis may hit again and to have quick adaptation mechanisms already in place to respond to such a crisis.

AbstractTo what extent is EU company law harmonized? This article first makes the point that little progress has been made in the direction of company law uniformity within the EU. It then argues that, even leaving aside the question of whether it would be desirable to have a uniform EU company law, that outcome is simply impossible to achieve, due to interest group resistance and the variety in national meta-rules. Yet it concludes that, in a narrow meaning, European company laws have indeed been harmonized: European Member States company laws fit together, which may well be what harmonization, not only etymologically, is all about.