NautaDutilh responds to the draft Act on the Governance and Supervision of Legal Entities (Wet bestuur en toezicht rechtspersonen)
The proposed legislation harmonises the rules governing the work of administrators and supervisors, and the rules for liability in the event of improper or negligent performance of duties. The grounds for dismissal of foundation administrators and supervisors who fail to perform their duties correctly will also be extended.
Among the points raised in their reaction, Marianne de Waard-Preller, Robrecht Timmermans and Renate Punt-Huizer have drawn attention to the lack of clarity regarding the term’ supervisory body’ that the draft act uses on the advice of the corporate law commission.
Although this is ‘neutral’ in the view of the authors, ‘in practice, it may happen that legal entities have multiple “bodies” that have a supervisory function’. In view of the fact that is it is conceivable that each supervisory body is responsible for supervising a specific part of the management’s policy, the authors wonder whether ‘each of these bodies responsible for part of the supervision should be considered as a supervisory body’.
In addition to this, in the interests of uniformity in the legislation, the authors plead for a legal basis for the one-tier form of governance for foundations and associations in Book 2 of the Civil Code and comment further on the proposal article by article.