Legal News

Do you have customers in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain or Austria?

Bad payers in one of these countries? Belgium has - finally - made it somewhat easier for you to recover your money.

From 2016, you can have undisputed "monetary debts" (usually unpaid invoices) easily recovered, i.e. without having to immediately go to court. The collection will then be carried out by the court bailiff (who we will manage for you).

Please note that this simple procedure is restricted to money debts between professionals. This means, among other things, that both you and your client must be registered in the Belgian Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE).

An annoying consequence of this was that this procedure could not actually be applied, as collection of an unpaid invoice was somewhat easier if a foreign company is involved. After all, your foreign client could only be registered in the Belgian CBE if it has a "Belgian office". Your corporate client is usually registered in a similar database in their own country, however.

In order to make the debt collection procedure more widely applicable, it was therefore decided to equate an entry in a corporate database of a European Member State with an entry in the CBE.

The enterprise databases of the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, Austria and Germany have already been declared to be equivalent from 1 October 2018.

However, if you read the above correctly, you’ll have seen that it says "somewhat easier”. The actual collection work only begins once the bailiff has a definitive "enforceable title". Your debtor - you can probably no longer speak of your "customer" - still has to pay, however.

If your debtor pays voluntarily, there is, of course, no problem, but, in most cases, the bailiff still has to proceed to "enforcement": i.e. seizing your debtor's property (household effects, stocks, bank accounts, etc.), selling them, collecting them together and distributing the proceeds among the various creditors.

The follow-up of these collections is very labour-intensive. It’s not unusual for an average SME to have a full-time employee for this.

Defensis Law Frim (Advocatenkantoor) takes care of the legal recovery of your unpaid invoices from A to Z, and has trained staff for this purpose, as well as specialised software.

Please contact us at legal@defensis.be for a quote.