Why must Investment Law and Enterprise Law be amended?

	New bill expected to promote PPP investment activities
	Giving Tax incentive to Information Technology projects
	A law revises many laws: recommendations to supplement and adjust contents

Practices have a requirement to continue to further improve some provisions of the Investment Law and the Enterprise Law. Photo: Internet

MPI said that in recent years, the National Assembly has issued or amended and supplemented many important laws to implement the Resolution of the 12th National Party Congress, implementing the constitution in 2013, of which it has Investment and Enterprise Law.

These laws have contributed to eliminating barriers to investment and business incompatible with the market economy and Vietnam's commitment to integration, creating a legal basis for improving the investment and business environment, in the direction of increasing convenience, transparency and equality among investors.

In particular, the Enterprise Law abolished a number of requirements and conditions at the time of establishment of enterprises to gradually change the management method from pre-check to post-check; simplify procedures and shorten the time to set up enterprises, issue investment registration certificates for foreign investors; abolish procedures for granting investment registration certificates to domestic investors; create conditions for enterprises to be proactive in the process of business operations and enterprise management organization.

However, according to MPI, in addition to the achieved results, after more than two years of implementation of the Investment Law, the Enterprise Law requires a further improvement of some provisions of these laws.

The first reason, according to MPI, according to Article 8 of the Investment Law, the National Assembly assigns the Government, based on the conditions of economic and social development and state management requirements in each period, proceeds to review business lines banned from business investment and conditional business lines for submission to the National Assembly for amendments and supplements to Articles 6 and 7 of this Law in shortened order and procedures.

Therefore, the continuation of reviewing, proposing amendments and supplements to regulations on business and investment sectors in accordance with the Law on Investment is defined as a regular and continuous task to remove barriers in investment and business activities, facilitating the market entry of people and businesses.

Secondly, the Law on Investment and the Law on Enterprises has large scale and level of reform in many sectors and fields and is implemented in the context of some other laws promulgated according to different approaches, so the implementation process has inevitably encountered some problems arising from the lack of consistency in the scope of adjustment between the Laws relating to business investment activities.

In fact, the Law on Public Investment, Law on Management and Use of State Capital Investing in Production, Business in Enterprises, Land Law, Construction Law, Real Estate Business Law, Housing Law, Law on Protection environment and some other specialized laws ... also adjust investment activities with different scope and level, but there is no clear delimitation of the scope of adjustment, leading to difficulties in identifying activities. Investment is regulated in accordance with the Investment Law and investment activities are governed by the above Laws.

Thirdly, although there have been many reforms in the direction of facilitating investment and business activities, the Ministry of Planning and Investment stated that some provisions of the Investment Law and the Enterprise Law are still lacking, do not really yet ensure feasibility.

Specifically, the Investment Law does not specify the concept, purpose, legal value, scope of application of the procedures for approving investment policies in accordance with each form of investment and use of capital, and at the same time, the procedures for approving investment policies with the procedures for auction of land use rights and bidding for selecting investors to implement investment projects with land use according to relevant provisions of the Land Law are not clearly defined.

The law also does not have reasonable regulations on decentralization of authority to approve investment policies in accordance with the requirements of administrative procedure reform in business investment activities.

Provisions of the Investment Law on forms of investment, procedures for establishment of foreign-invested economic organizations, procedures for capital contribution, share purchase of foreign investors and procedures for implementing investment projects (such as adjusting, suspending, delaying, terminating investment projects, etc.), there are some specific contents that lead to incompatibility in the implementation process.

In addition, the Investment Law did not clarify the purpose and legal value of the offshore Investment Registration Certificate; the form of offshore investment is not really consistent with international practices and practices of overseas investment activities of Vietnamese enterprises; records, order of decision on investment abroad of SOEs have not been stipulated uniformly between the Investment Law and the Law on management and use of state capital invested in production and business in enterprises.

Reviewing the Enterprise Law and Investment Law after one year Nearly 106 000 enterprises have been established and some 3 500 ineffective business regulations have been eliminated ...

Also according to MPI, the provisions of the Enterprise Law regarding the application of specialized laws relating to the establishment of enterprises lead to the dispersion of clues for registration of enterprises, not really creating favorable conditions for enterprises when they have requested to change business activities. Some regulations on enterprise management are still lacking flexibility.