News type
Date end
News memo
The health-care provider Phoenix from Mannheim has been avoiding any supervisory board-level participation since it was founded in 1994. At the time, the billionaire family Merckle had acquired five regional pharmaceutical wholesalers in Germany and subsequently expanded massively throughout Europe. Today the Phoenix Pharma SE has 34,000 employees in 26 countries throughout Europe (including 4,400 in Germany) and runs 2,000 pharmacies in 13 countries. Initially it was the choice of the legal form which ensured that the company did not fall under codetermination laws. In January 2014, the general partnership was then shifted to Liechtenstein to continue avoiding any codetermination. The return to Mannheim was carried out in the European Company (SE) legal form. For this purpose, the Merckle group founded an SE in August 2016 with no employees, which became the parent company of Phoenix on 7 April 2017. By these means, the supervisory board will remain permanently free of any employee representation.
The Special Negotiating Body signed a SE participation agreement on 6 December 2016 in Mannheim. In the future the SE works council will replace the European works council, which was already established in 1996 on a "voluntary" basis and has been under German EWC jurisdiction since 2001. The SE works council has 35 members from 19 countries plus one guest delegate each from the EU acceding countries, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The largest countries; Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Norway have four mandates each. Furthermore, the United Kingdom is to remain represented in the SE works council following the Brexit.
The seven member steering committee meets three times annually. Plenary meetings are held twice per year. There are up to two consultation meetings for any restructuring, however the whole procedure must be terminated within eight weeks at the latest. Only then can central management implement any planned measures e.g. proceed with redundancies. A full-parity arbitration board is established to resolve any disputes.
Source Info
News date