20 Years of the SE Regulation – The Rise of a Specific Purpose Vehicle?

20 years ago, on 8 October 2001, Council Regulation (EC) No 2157/2001 on the Statute for a European company (SE) was enacted (the ‘SE Regulation’). This legislative act has given rise to the European public limited liability company law form called Societas Europaea or, in its short form, ‘SE’. The Societas Europaea exists in all EU Member States based on the national transposition of the SE Regulation, and it is the most important of three European company law forms next to the European Cooperative Society (SCE) and the European Economic Interest Grouping (EEIG). Such birthday seems an appropriate occasion to reflect on the project of the Societas Europaea. The argument brought forward in this editorial is that that the SE may have to be regarded from a more specialised perspective than an attempt to create a European counterpart emulating a flagship national company law form. Rather, the entity could be adapted to specific purposes following larger pan-European commercial demands, for example in the area of financing transactions. At the beginning, the SE was a dream: even before the creation of the European Union, on the 26th German Juristentag in 1926, Geiler proposed the creation of a supranational company form which would be available along with its national counterparts. Further, shortly after the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957 with the Treaty of Rome, on 22 October 1959, Sanders addressed the topic of a European public limited liability company in an inaugural lecture at the University of Rotterdam. The idea behind the European public limited liability was not so much to harmonise the provisions of national public limited liability company law forms, which one could also call the national flagship company law forms, like the German Aktiengesellschaft, the French société anonyme, or the Dutch naamloze vennootschap; the idea was instead to add a European public limited liability company law form, which would then exist throughout all Member States. Foreign investors, for example, would not have to become familiar with specific national company forms but could fall back in each Member State on the same European company law form. Moreover, the company law form would be highly modern and reflect