“Sustainable business transfers in Europe, with specific focus on business transfers to employees”

The European Commission has estimated that around 150,000 enterprises employing around 600,000 persons may be lost each year over the next few years, if no transfer plan or heir is found for them, with SMEs being the most exposed. At a time when banks are retracting credit in the crisis, a time of the Basel III agreements, and when private investors are hesitant to invest in the Euro economy in recession, effective and sustainable business transfers are, more than ever, a crucial issue in Europe. Since the crisis began in 2008, several hundred businesses, mostly SMEs, that were on the verge of being closed down, have been successfully transferred to their employees under the form of a cooperative. Generally, a substantial part of the jobs have been maintained, and job creation has re-started. In all cases, the maintenance of an industrial or service activity in a community has contributed to the maintenance or even consolidation of the local entrepreneurial fabric, thus keeping in place more jobs than those actually saved in the transferred enterprise itself. This practice, though, did not start with the 2008 crisis, as the first recorded cases of it are over a century old. Some of them have since become very strong and industrial enterprises, such as Ceramica Imola in Italy or Chèque Déjeuner in France. Business transfers to employees have since then been repeated in various national environments around the world, and in the most varied economic sectors. This experience shows that the rate of success is high, provided a series of conditions are met. The European Commission has made business transfers one of the priorities of the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. The conference organized by CECOP will be an opportunity to present the experience of business transfers to employees under the form of a cooperative from different European countries, as well as the organizational conditions set by the actors involved and the public policy environment that is conducive to its success. It will also be an opportunity to discuss the anticipation and effectiveness of business transfers in general with other actors concerned by it.