Caught on Cam: Zooming Into the NPC’s Vlogging Guidelines
By: Atty. Maria Angela T. Mercado June 30, 2025 – In today’s digital age, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. Our social media feeds now function as digital windows that enable us to showcase our, and peer into others’, curated lives.
You Might as Well-Known: Highlights of IPOPHL’s Rules on the Register of Well-Known Marks
By: Atty. Luis Teodoro B. Pascua June 19, 2025 – Well-known Marks are a subset of trademarks that possess a high degree of reputation, recognition, and consequently, protection. In the Philippines, well-known marks, “whether registered or unregistered, is afforded substantial legal protection by granting the exclusive right to prevent others from using identical or confusingly …
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS LIECHTENSTEIN
Overview Mergers, acquisitions, and corporate transformations in Liechtenstein occur within a unique nexus of domestic law and European Economic Area (EEA) frameworks. Liechtenstein’s small yet sophisticated market means that most transactions are cross-border in nature, often involving foreign investors or group restructurings across jurisdictions. The Principality’s Persons and Companies Act (Personen- und Gesellschaftsrecht) (PGR) provides …
Nuances of Liechtenstein Tax Structure: An Overview of the Taxation of Natural and Legal Entities and International Tax Law
Direct Taxes on Natural Persons In Liechtenstein, natural persons are subjected to wealth and income taxes. Both state and municipal taxes are imposed, with the state tax rate escalating progressively within an eight-tier rate structure, the highest tariff being 8%. The municipal tax operates by adding a surcharge to the state tax, ranging between 150% …
The Financial Service of Issuance Business under MiFID in Europe
Introduction The realm of financial services is replete with complexities, particularly when it comes to the issuance of financial instruments. The European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID 2 as amended) provides a legal framework that governs the issuance business, a term that encapsulates the issuance of financial instruments for one’s own risk or the …
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Crypto-Asset Transparency 2.0 – How Liechtenstein’s Forthcoming CARF Act And CRS Revision Will Reshape Cross-Border Compliance From 2026
Hardly any other European financial centre has managed, within such a compact geographic perimeter, to translate the ever-accelerating OECD agenda on tax transparency into binding domestic law as swiftly and thoroughly as the Principality of Liechtenstein; and yet, with the draft Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework Act (“CARF-G”) and the amending statute to the Automatic Exchange of …
Reverse Solicitation Meets Stablecoin Scrutiny – How ESMA’s Guidelines and Statements Re‑shape Third‑Country Crypto‑Service Access to the European Single Market
When the European Securities and Markets Authority (“ESMA”) released, in close succession, (i) its Guidelines on situations in which a third‑country firm is deemed to solicit clients established or situated in the European Union and the supervision practices to detect and prevent circumvention of the reverse‑solicitation exemption under the Markets in Crypto‑Assets Regulation (“MiCA”) on 26 February 2025, …
From Forked Mandates to Regulatory Harmony: How the EBA’s No‑Action Letter Re‑maps the MiCAR–PSD2 Frontier for E‑Money‑Token Service Providers
When the European Banking Authority (“EBA”) released its 34‑page No‑Action Letter on 10 June 2025, it did rather more than grant a temporary supervisory reprieve to crypto‑asset service providers (“CASPs”) transacting electronic‑money tokens (“EMTs”); it exposed, with almost surgical precision, the structural incongruities created by the parallel application of the Markets in Crypto‑Assets Regulation (“MiCAR”), the Second Electronic Money …
AMLA’s New Bar for Crypto: What EU-Facing CASPs Must Build Now (and How Liechtenstein Can Lead)
The European Union’s new Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) is not simply another acronym in the alphabet soup of financial regulation; it is the linchpin of a redesigned supervisory architecture which, taken together with the Single Rulebook Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), the Sixth AML Directive (6AMLD), the Funds/crypto “travel rule”, and MiCA’s prudential and conduct regime …
Liechtenstein’s MiFIDMiFIR Overhaul Payment-for-Order-Flow Ban, Consolidated Tape, and New Transparency Duties — What Banks, Investment Firms and Tokenized-Securities Platforms Must Implement by 2025–2026
Introduction In a move that is both evolutionary in its policy intent and revolutionary in its operational consequences, the European Union’s reform of MiFIR and MiFID II—adopted at EU level and already in force there—now cascades into Liechtenstein via a comprehensive legislative package that amends the Securities Services Act, the Investment Firms Act, the Asset …