To celebrate the 80th anniversary of VANEPS, the firm launched a new event concept on Friday 10 November called ‘RECHT&’ (literally: ‘LAW&’), an interactive knowledge café. The first edition focused on the National ordinance on competition, which went into effect in Curaçao on 1 September of this year.
During ‘RECHT& Concurrentie’ (‘LAW& Competition’), the consequences of the new National ordinance were discussed from a macro-economic, legal and business organizational perspective. Three keynote speakers made short thought-provoking statements, to which the panel and public could then respond. The discussion on the macro-economic terrain was introduced by the Minister of Economic Development, Steven Martina. Keynote speaker on the legal aspects was Rogier van den Heuvel, partner at VANEPS and an expert in the field of competition law. Finally, Justus van der Lubbe, CEO of Inter Assure, tackled the business organizational perspective. Apart from the abovementioned speakers, the panel featured Albert Scholten, implementation manager of the Fair Trade Authority Curaçao (FTAC), and Steven Coutinho, member of the SER and Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Aqualectra.
Frank Kunneman, partner at VANEPS and the moderator of the event, led a lively panel discussion after each statement made by the speakers. Subsequently there was room for questions from and discussion with the public, which welcomed the new concept enthusiastically. The participants were very pleased with the choice of topic and the program’s broad (not strictly legal) outlook. VANEPS is happy that ‘RECHT&’ was such a success and intends to repeat the concept periodically in the future, also on the other Caribbean islands where it is active.
