The New Legal Regime On Minority Shareholder Protection In Albania

This article aims at introducing the main changes brought by the new Albanian Company Law on minority shareholders’ protection. Due to the harmonization of our legislation with the acqui, new pieces of laws were introduced in commercial law. In 2008 the new law “On entrepreneurs and commercial companies” was enacted. The latter introduced new practices and concepts, some of them not familiar to the Albanian legal system. I was motivated to write a paper on minority shareholders protection in order to emphasize the new regime and instruments of protection granted by the new laws. A matter which concerns investors and especially foreign ones is the protection of minority shareholders. This paper discusses the instruments of protection of minority shareholders bringing the novelties of the newly introduced laws because of the unclear regime under the repealed law using the analytical and comparative method. Few rights which were known by the former Albanian company law were usually compromised, but under the law in force, minorities are much more protected. Does the new law strengthen the position of such category of shareholders? What are the rights of minority shareholders conferred by the law? These and other questions will be addressed herein.