Prior to the adoption of Regulation 2001/2157 on the Statute for a European Company (SE) (the SE-Regulation) and Directive 2005/56/EC on cross-border mergers of limited liability companies (the Directive), cross-border mergers in the European Union (EU) were not regulated on an EU-wide basis and their implementation was therefore hardly feasible in practice. Cross-border mergers required that the national laws of both jurisdictions (i.e. the jurisdiction of the transferring company and the jurisdiction of the absorbing company) recognized the procedure for mergers of companies through universal succession. Many EU jurisdictions did not specifically recognize this procedure. Even where both jurisdictions recognized the procedure, problems frequently arose in practice since the national rules for implementing such mergers in one jurisdiction were incompatible with those in the other jurisdiction. Some EU member states, such as Germany, imposed legislative obstacles to cross-border mergers.