THE EEIG is a legal structure created by the European Union with the French GIE (groupement d’intérêt économique) as its reference.
It was created with the aim of achieving international cooperation aimed at uniting the knowledge and resources of economic structures of at least two countries making up the Union. In the European standardizer’s objective, this should allow small and medium-sized enterprises to be able to participate in projects larger than their size would allow by acting as a single player.
However, the purpose of the EEIG is not to obtain a profit, although this is not prohibited, but rather to provide assistance to the activities of the European companies that constitute it. The main characteristic of an EEIG is that it must be set up by companies from at least two countries making up the European Union, while companies from third countries are not allowed to participate; furthermore, at the time of incorporation, it can be decided whether or not to give a predetermined deadline to the EEIG.
The European legislator leaves considerable room for autonomy to the parties in the contractual regulation of an EEIG.
Furthermore, it leaves some detailed aspects of the regulation to national legislators (always within the limits of the implementation of common principles), also to allow individual countries to standardize this new type of entity with those already existing in the various internal legislations.
Thus in some countries, such as France, EEIGs have been assimilated to national bodies with the same characteristics (the aforementioned EIGs); elsewhere, national economic interest groups have been specifically established.
Overall, even if the legislation on EEIGs is substantially uniform regardless of the State in which it is registered, each EEIG is subject to the jurisprudence of the country in which its headquarters are located which, for this reason, must be declared in the articles of association under penalty of invalidity of the constitution itself.