Insights

With the judgment case no. C-555/21 the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) answered a preliminary question addressed to it by the Austrian Supreme Court regarding the interpretation of Directive 2014/17 on credit agreements for consumers relating to residential immovable property.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, 219,153 Russian citizens have immigrated to Serbia. In contrast, over the past year, more than four thousand Russian entrepreneurs and companies have been established in Serbia. In response to the newly emerging market circumstances, the Government of Serbia adopted the Decree on the criteria for awarding incentives to employers who employ foreign nationals in mid-June of last year.

Sheikh Rashid Bin Ahmed Al Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s ruling family, announced that he would offer cooperation opportunities for companies in Central and South Eastern Europe to participate in the national development program called ‘Operation 300 billion’. In March 2021, the UAE launched its 10-year comprehensive strategy to make industry the engine of a sustainable national economy. With this strategy, the Emirates plan to position itself as a global industrial hub by 2031 and to reach 300 billion dirhams (81.7 billion USD) of the gross national product from the current 133 billion dirhams (36.2 billion USD).

The new Personal Data Protection Act (hereinafter: “ZVOP-2”) was adopted by the National Assembly on 15 December 2022, published in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia on 27 December 2022 and entered into force on 26 January 2023. Slovenia is thus the last EU Member State to adopt national legislation on personal data protection, thereby regulating some of the matters that the General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”) left to the Member States.

One of the long-debated domestic themes is non-existence of retail NPL market in Serbia. Following the 2008 World Economic Crisis in Serbia, the country managed to regulate corporate NPL market, and to decrease NPL level from 20% to 3,19 %. However, retail NPL market remained a taboo. There are several reasons for this and the main one is that the general public fears that regulating retail NPL (“RNPL”) market would legalize debt slavery.