Cork: A founder who wants to incorporate once and sell across the single market has been promised a European company form for the better part of a decade, and the promise now has a calendar without a decision point on it.

The Commission tabled its proposal for an optional EU corporate legal form on 18 March 2026, the instrument most people call the 28th regime and some call EU Inc. Any limited liability company registered in a member state could opt into it, gaining fast digital registration valid across the Union and a single rulebook in place of twenty-seven national company law systems. Six months on, the file sits in the slow middle of the ordinary legislative procedure.

The rapporteur’s draft report is dated 29 June. Committee amendments were tabled on 22 July. The legal affairs committee returned to them on 7 September without compromise amendments and without a scheduled vote, with its next sitting on 28 September. The Council’s working party has been grinding through the Irish Presidency’s first compromise text with sessions on 10 and 17 September, another on 29 September and a further one on 8 October.

The absence of a compromise text is the story

Six weeks after amendments close, a rapporteur who intends to move quickly circulates compromises. Their absence here indicates that the political groups have not converged on the questions that actually decide whether the regime is useful, and those questions are narrower and more technical than the founders campaigning for EU Inc tend to acknowledge.

Company law is not a single subject. It is a bundle of employment representation rules, insolvency ranking, minority shareholder protection, tax residence tests and registration formalities, each of which a different member state regards as constitutionally settled. An optional 28th regime that harmonises registration while leaving the other five untouched delivers a faster incorporation certificate and very little else, because the frictions that stop a company scaling across borders live in the parts that were left alone.

An optional regime that does reach into those parts collides immediately with national systems of worker board representation and with corporate tax bases that ministries defend far more energetically than they defend registration procedures. Parliament’s research service has laid out this tension carefully in its briefing on the 28th regime, and no amount of startup advocacy dissolves it.

What optionality does and does not solve

Making the regime optional is the classic escape from that bind, and it works better in theory than in practice. Optionality means nobody is forced to abandon a national form, which lowers political resistance. It also means the new form must be genuinely more attractive than the alternative, or nobody uses it, and Europe already has an instructive precedent. The European Company statute has existed since 2004 and has attracted a few thousand registrations across the entire Union, most of them large firms restructuring for reasons unrelated to cross-border growth. A second optional form that repeats the same design error produces the same result with better branding.

The more promising argument for the 28th regime is not legal but informational. A venture investor in one member state currently prices the legal risk of a target incorporated in another partly through ignorance of that jurisdiction’s insolvency and shareholder rules. A recognisable single form, if it carries genuinely uniform substance, removes that discount. The Commission has attached the file to its wider European Innovation Act agenda for precisely this reason.

That benefit only materialises if the substance is uniform. Each carve-out negotiated to secure a member state’s agreement reduces the informational value of the label, and enough carve-outs turn EU Inc into twenty-seven regimes wearing one name.

The Council working party sessions running to 8 October will show which carve-outs the Irish Presidency thinks it must concede. Watch that list rather than the committee vote count. It will tell you whether Europe is building a company form or a compliance veneer.