| 2020 will be remembered as a year of difficulties in which we have witnessed the Covid-19, the most infectious pandemic in the last century, the loss of our loved ones, the closure of our businesses, and have been trapped in our homes. Even in such hard times, we have adapted to the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic and, despite all of the obstacles, we are honored to present to you our new book, 'Newsletter 2020'. Our Newsletter 2020 also contains articles in which we discuss the effects of Covid-19 on the legal environment. We have examined Covid-19 in terms of corporate law, competition law, lease agreements, arbitration, labor law, sports law and tax law. We have published 13 articles in the field of commercial law. We published 11 competition law related articles. As a GAR100 listed law firm with a proven track record in international arbitration, we published 12 articles. Within the field of capital markets law, very significant legal regulations were made. The Communiqué on the principles of abolishing privileges, the Communiqué on significant transactions and retirement rights, and the Communiqué on board of debt instrument holders, were analyzed in some of the articles. We also examined collateral agreements on capital market instruments. With respect to civil procedure law, we both discussed the amendments to the civil procedure law, and examined two important decisions of the Court of Cassation General Assembly on the Unification of Case Law. In terms of tax law, we addressed the recent amendments made to the tax legislation, the withholding tax regime envisaged for share buybacks, special consumption tax, taxation of capital decreases in partial spin-offs, tax reductions for tax-compliant taxpayers, non-physical gold sales, and the BITT. In addition, we discussed current issues in the fields of sports law, business law, intellectual property law, information technology law and protection of personal data. We also looked into topics of interest, such as the evidential value of WhatsApp employee correspondence, as well as the changes in the energy market. The chapter on Legal Developments provides global insight into material developments in international agreements, laws, presidential decisions, regulations, and communiqués, the decisions of the Turkish Competition Board Authority, important developments in energy law legislation, as well as extracts of key precedents that were adopted in 2020. It has been a generous year in terms of various legal regulations. We believe that this last chapter portrays an executive look on legal developments. |