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Our friends at Lawyr.it, a peer-reviewed legal journal focused on Central and Eastern Europe, has launched the seventh issue of their magazine, which contains articles on a wide range of legal subjects, from a special section dedicated to opportunities for law students and legal events, to articles on international law.

You can also find two interviews in the Professional Spotlight section, with Cosmin Costas, lawyer and teaching assistant of Public finance law, and Claudiu Gligan, judge at the Cluj Commercial Court and lecturer at the Faculty of Law. Don’t forget to check a very interesting debate on consumer disputes in the Devil’s Advocate section.

Furthermore, as Lawyr.it celebrates two years of activity, they have also launched a special edition containing the best articles that were published in the magazine, as well as a lengthy interview with some special guests. 

You can find more details on their release here.

McGregor & Partners has announced that it has assisted the British Romanian Chamber of Commerce gain official accreditation as a member of the British Chambers of Commerce Global Accredited Network.

The BRCC is the bilateral chamber of commerce operating in Romania and in the UK. According to the firm, “accreditation allows the BRCC to receive public funding from the UK government to promote trade between the UK and Romania. This is part of an official scheme whereby a limited number of UK chambers of commerce in the EU and the rest of the world are recognized as having achieved the highest standards of corporate governance and client service, so as to allow them to assume responsibility for official UK bilateral trade promotion work. Romania has been recognized by the UK government as a high-growth economy with particular opportunities for the promotion of trade with the UK, including through the organization of a high-profile trade Megamission in March 2015, covering the oil & gas and nuclear energy sectors as well as the environment, water and mass transport sectors. UK government funding will allow the BRCC to expand the support it provides to members and other customers in making it easier for British and Romanian firms to do business with each other.”

To gain official accreditation, it was necessary for the BRCC to pass stringent inspections on matters of corporate governance, ethics, organization and business practices. Substantial external legal support was required by the BRCC to prepare for and to successfully pass all of these inspections. McGregor & Partners were appointed by the BRCC in May 2014 to advise on both Romanian and UK law and to provide practical legal support for the accreditation process. This included the preparation of new constitutive documents which were unanimously approved by the members of the BRCC at their general meeting in October 2014, and assistance in producing numerous documents for, and representing the BRCC in, the official inspections.

The McGregor & Partners team working with the BRCC on this project was led by Managing Partner Neil McGregor and Managing Associate Simona Lehniuc. 

“The process of obtaining official accreditation is not an easy one, particularly since there are strict UK requirements which needed to be co-ordinated with the practicalities of doing business in Romania,” said McGregor. “I am delighted that the success of our work on the structure and operations of the BRCC has been recognized by the award of accredited status to the BRCC at the first attempt.”

Ray Breden, the Executive Chairman of the BRCC, spoke about the results of McGregor & Partners’ work on the matter: “I have previously worked with Simona and Neil and was aware of their expertise in corporate governance matters, particularly where there is an official aspect to the work. They and their colleagues at McGregor & Partners have provided practical, timely and efficient advice to the BRCC in the vital process of securing access to UK government funding. Accreditation is a mark of the effectiveness of the BRCC in promoting UK-Romania trade and I look forward to continuing to work with McGregor & Partners in this in the future.”

Dentons’ Real Estate team has acted as legal counsel to Skanska Property Poland on the preliminary sale of its Dominikanski office building in Wroclaw, Poland, to Union Investment, the Hamburg-based real estate investment manager.

Dominikanski, Skanska’s fourth office investment in Wroclaw, is located in the city center. Currently under construction, the building will offer approximately 40,000 square meters of modern leasable space and is already half-leased to tenants such as HP Global Business Center, Deloitte, and PKO BP. The hand-over of the property is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2015.

The Dentons team was led by Partner Pawel Debowski, Chairman of the firm’s European Real Estate Group, and included Senior Associate Bartlomiej Kordeczka and Associate Jacek Jezierski.  

Debowski said: “With highly qualified and multilingual staff, city location, transport network and increasing office supply, Wroc?aw is one of top outsourcing locations in Poland desired by the business services sector. Skanska’s recent sale of Kapelanka 42 office building in Kraków and now Dominikanski in Wroc?aw only further affirm international investors’ growing interest in the Polish regional cities.”

This makes the third office building Skanska has sold in Poland in the last three months, all of which Dentons has advised on, following the December sale of the Green Horizon office building in Lodz and the November sale of a building in the Kapelanka 42 complex in Krakow.

Image source: skanska.pl

Sorainen Lithuania has advised Dezinfa, a leading provider of pest control services and products in Lithuania, on its acquisition via privatisation (public auction) of Kauno Profilaktines Dezinfekcijos Stotis (Kaunas Prophylactic Disinfection Station), a company owned by the  Kaunas city municipality providing pest control and disinfection services.

The acquisition will further strengthen Dezinfa’s position in the pest control market. The target company employs approximately 30 people serving companies throughout Lithuania. 

Sorainen Partner Algirdas Peksys and Associate Evaldas Dudonis led the firm’s team on the matter.

Although no CEE lawyers are among the six new equity partnerships announced by Noerr as of January 1st, 2015, lawyers from the firm’s Moscow, Bucharest, and Budapest offices have been promoted to National Partner and Associated Partner.

Zoltan Nadasdy has been made new Senior Counsel (National Partner) in the firm’s Budapest office. Nadasy works in the firm’s Real Estate Investment and Corporate/M&A groups. He specializes in real estate transactions and investments, commercial tenancy law as well as in corporate law and commercial law. Recent projects included advising the Hungarian company Norm Benzinkut on the purchase of the Lukoil petrol station network in Hungary and Slovakia, IVG on the sale of its Hungarian development company, DB Schenker in Hungary on a contract with the logistics real estate company Prologis, and the Japanese automotive parts supplier Takata on the construction of a production facility in Hungary. Nadasdy has been co-head of the Budapest Noerr office since the middle of 2009.

Among the new Local Partners are Victor Gerbutov in Moscow, who focuses on Litigation, Arbitration & ADR, and Intellectual Property, and Mihai Macelaru in Bucharest, who focuses on Corporate/M&A, Capital Markets, and Private Equity & Venture Capital (whose promotion CEE Legal Matters already reported on here).

In a statement released by the firm, Noerr Co-Speaker Alexander Rivay says that, “the appointment of partners and associated partners from various different areas underlines our strategy of offering clients an integrated service. First-class advisors therefore always have the opportunity to become a partner irrespective of whether they work in strategic growth areas. This is an approach which we will continue to take in future as it has proved very successful in previous years.”

The Erdal Law Firm announced on January 6, 2015, that Tarkan Erdal has been appointed Managing Partner of the firm.

Erdal’s practice encompasses litigation, dispute resolution, debt recovery, enforcement of judicial and arbitration awards, sports law, real estate law, inheritance law, commercial law, administrative law, corporate and contract law, and M&A matters. He is a graduate of the Istanbul University Faculty of Law and has an LLM degree in private law from Marmara University. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Istanbul University Faculty of Law on private law. 

Erdal is a member of the Istanbul Bar (where he is an active member of the Sports and Sports Law Commission) and is one of the first authorized mediators registered with the Department of Mediation of the Ministry of Justice. He is also one of the founders and a board member and secretary general of the Mediation Association. 

Kinstellar reports that senior Czech finance and capital markets lawyer Kvetoslav Krejci has come on board in the firm’s Prague office.

Krejci joins Kinstellar from White & Case, where he spent the first 16 years of his career. Krejci, who was a local partner at White & Case, joins Kinstellar as Counsel.

“We are extremely happy to have Kvetoslav on board and to be able to draw on his experience, know-how and contacts,” said Lukas Sevcík, Managing Partner, Kinstellar, Prague. “He is one of the very few real stars in the Czech legal market and it is great that he is now with Kinstellar.”

Krejci specializes in debt and equity capital markets and bank financing, but also mergers and acquisitions as well as general corporate matters and dispute resolution. He has represented financial institutions, pharmaceutical and utility companies such as CEZ in connection with financial transactions and stock exchange listings, as well as Raiffeisenbank Ceska sporitelna, CSOB and Ceske drahy. He also advises Japanese investors and speaks Japanese fluently. 

Krejci is at least the 6th partner to leave White & Case’s Prague office in the past year, as Ladislav Smejkal and Jiri Tomola left in September to join Dentons, (where they joined Richard Singer, White & Case’s EMEA Director of Strategic Projects, who had left in July), and Jakub Dostal, Petr Kuhn, and Ivo Barta, who left earlier in the year to found the BADOKH law firm in Prague. 

Hogan Lovells has announced its promotion of 65 new Partners, Counsels, Of Counsels, and Consultants, only one of which — Arbitrator Anton Smirnov, who was promoted to Counsel in the firm’s Moscow office — comes from the firm’s four CEE offices (Moscow, Warsaw, Budapest, and Zagreb).

The firm’s former office in Prague, which was its fifth in CEE, closed this past summer.

In an official statement released by the firm, Hogan Lovells CEO Steve Immelt said: “Nurturing and promoting the excellent talent that we have within the business at Hogan Lovells is central to our strategy of providing the best service and the best talent in the legal sector to our clients. These individuals represent the quality, breadth, and depth of Hogan Lovells around the world, which no other law firm can match. The promotions demonstrate our ongoing investment in our business. We congratulate all those who were promoted and wish them every success in the future.”

FKA Furtek Komosa Aleksandrowicz has announced that Partner Marek Furtek has been appointed by the board of the Polish Chamber of Commerce to the position of President of the Court of Arbitration at the Polish Chamber of Commerce for a third consecutive term.

Furtek has held the position of the President of the Court of Arbitration at the PCC since March 26, 2009, and now will stay in the position at least through 2018.  

According to an FKA statement, Furtek is “an arbitrator or representative in numerous domestic and international arbitration proceedings before permanent courts (including SAKIG, VIAC, ICC, ZBP) and ad hoc courts. Additionally Marek Furtek has relevant experience as an arbitrator in proceedings involving the State Treasury and in disputes over infrastructure projects …. In his coming term of office, Marek Furtek announced that he intends to follow the principal direction of the court’s present activity: “I think that we need to focus on promoting arbitration as an efficient and professional means of dispute resolution between business entities, as well as on creating a legislative environment which facilitates the development of arbitration.” Other announced objectives are to strengthen the position of the Court of Arbitration at the PCC as the largest and the most prestigious Polish institution of arbitration and to reinforce its presence internationally.