The Objective, 20 September, 2026
\nEU Inc., the optional EU-wide company form the Commission proposed in March as the cornerstone of the “28th regime” Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi had called for, has drawn 1,664 amendments.
\nThe Left, the Greens, the Patriots for Europe and part of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) join the rapporteur in denying the new company its freedom exactly where it would be worth something: hiring, raising capital, paying tax and going bankrupt.
\nA company is a contract among its shareholders; a business hires, sells, borrows and pays tax outside that contract. The Commission loosened the internal contract, with no minimum capital, digital shares, share classes and online meetings, and touched the outside only at the edges, with a tax deferral on share options and a simplified winding-up for innovative start-ups. Tailor-made shares are worth little to a company that cannot place them across borders on uniform terms, hire and fire at predictable cost or know which insolvency court awaits it; the Commission’s impact assessment puts the savings at €328m to €440m over ten years for some 308,000 companies, one to two hundred euros per company per year.
\nWith so short a reach, nobody would need to close EU Inc. to cleaners. The rapporteur, a German social democrat, bars it from construction, cleaning, hospitality, road haulage, residential care, meat processing and private security, activities he deems “unlikely to develop a new or improved product, service or process”. He calls a form closed to cleaners a “seal of quality”.
\nThe Left stretches the list to twenty activities, including all of manufacturing, finance, farming, fishing and bars. The Patriots propose twelve, among them taxis, hairdressers and the textile workshops from which Zara grew, “due to the potential for circumvention of fiscal and social rules and/or due to their non-innovative nature”.
\nThe seven sectors all three lists share employ the most low-skilled and posted workers, and the fear is that a company registrable in 48 hours for €100 makes letterbox companies cheaper. But a posted worker already earns the host country’s pay and pays social contributions at home for two years, whether the employer is Polish or European, and Rome I gives local hires the mandatory law of their workplace, so the blacklist adds no protection to any employment contract. It merely denies the European form to businesses that cross borders every week, from the Portuguese cleaner in Paris to the Polish haulier.
\nThe Left and the Patriots, who each move to reject the proposal outright, also cap EU Inc. at fewer than 100 employees and ten years of age, bar it from any stock exchange, delete the insolvency chapter and strike out its only tax clause, on employee share options.
\nA Danish liberal from the EPP and The Left sign the same sentence: “National labour law and practices continue to fully apply in the Member State where the work is habitually performed.” The rapporteur and the Patriots coincide word for word on subjecting worker participation to the law of the workplace. The Left would have incorporation take fifteen working days and, in another amendment, turn the Commission’s €100 cap into a “maximum minimum cost of EUR 1000”.
\nThe digital company fares no better. Czech Patriots want proof of a bank account before registration and a Union passport for at least one member of its supervisory body. The Patriots want the articles of association written in the language of every member state where the company does business; the EPP wants them in English.
\nNot even start-ups are spared: a French socialist would have founders declare their “expected sources of revenue” before the company exists.
\nWhen such opposite groups fight on the same side, they must share an interest. One side defends the unions and the other national sovereignty, but both protect the national back office of labour regulation, taxation, notaries and registries against competition from the other twenty-six. Even the EPP members who would open EU Inc. to anyone “irrespective of the size, sector, prior legal form, or age” go no further: none would let the company choose its labour or tax regime, and their shadow rapporteur deletes the insolvency chapter.
\nThe groups will fix their positions in the committee vote and the plenary expected in the coming weeks; until then most amendments bind only the members who sign them. But those members are not fringe figures: they span the establishment and its anti-system alternatives. Europe will remain lost as long as European citizens distrust free enterprise, and these 1,664 amendments have just put that distrust in writing.
\nThe worst of these amendments is not that politicians propose nonsense; it is that, when they do, they are all too representative. Europeans prefer the protection of their national back office to a European company that might escape it, and their parliament delivers exactly that.
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