Mobilität gemeinnütziger Stiftungen in Europa durch Wandlung

“Mobility through transformation” – under this motto the work at hand promotes a new European Foundation Law. German non-profit foundations are captured in a territorial lock-up. Top-down approaches to create mobility are deemed to fail, as the discontinued efforts to introduce a European Foundation (FE) show. The EU member states refuse to accept national non-profit tax laws that are penetrable, neither inbound nor outbound. This work does not challenge such status quo; instead, it presents ways that may offer foundations a way out of the lock-up (and in). The work takes a bottom-up approach by challenging long-held believes as to the treatment of foundations crossing borders, resulting in cross-border mobility founded in the national laws of the EU jurisdictions involved. Such mobility is achieved by transforming a foundation into its corresponding legal format in the envisioned jurisdiction without losing legal identity in the process. The transformation, in return, unlocks the non-profit tax laws of the EU member states, thereby breaking through these well-defended walls.