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The Ottobock Company has been operating under the SE & Co. KGaA legal form since 3 April 2018. This family-owned business from Duderstadt in southern Lower Saxony was founded in 1919 to supply war victims with prostheses. Today, Ottobock is the world´s market leader in orthopedic technology with 7,600 employees worldwide and also does business in plastics processing and IT and communication technology. Since 2017, a Swedish financial investor has taken a share in Ottobock to finance its growth through acquisitions.
The SE & Co. KGaA legal form is increasingly used by family businesses in actual fact to side-step supervisory board-level participation which is mandatory in a SE conversion. Employee representatives are kept well away from any strategic decisions. In Ottobock, for the partnership limited by shares (KGaA), there is one European-level supervisory board with six shareholder and four employee representatives and a further administrative board running alongside it for Ottobock Management SE, however without employee representatives. No SE works council has been established since the SE does not have any employees. The conversion took place according to the EU Mergers Directive and the participation agreement was signed by the Special Negotiating Body, on 6 November 2016.
The EU Merger Directive is still relatively seldom used and was most recently by the Austrian group RHI in October 2017. It regulates codetermination in the supervisory board but does not address the topic of works councils. As a result Ottobock falls under the "normal" EWC Directive. This requires however that the works councils in two countries take the initiative to begin the procedure for establishing the EWC.
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