What are cooperative shares?

There is in Germany about 12,000 cooperatives with more than 10 million members. The annual turnover of the goods cooperatives alone is around € 40 billion. You will recognize the economic and political importance of the cooperative idea. You can tell exactly what cooperative shares are if you know the structure of a cooperative.

How to acquire cooperative shares

• The cooperative is a person under legal law. As such, it has independent rights and obligations and can acquire property as well as sue in court and be sued itself.
• The essential feature of a cooperative is the free change in membership. In this way, the cooperative differs on the one hand from partnerships in which new members are accepted by depends on the consent of the co-partners, on the other hand on the corporations, in which by the number of business shares respectively. Shares the membership is fixed.
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• The cooperative operates as a registered cooperative with the abbreviation e. G..

What are the foundation purposes

• Their purpose is to promote the acquisition or the business of its members through joint business operations. It is not itself a trading company because its business operations are not geared towards acquiring, but rather promoting its members.


Shares in the Spardabank - notes

As a customer of Spardabank, you are also a comrade. To become a customer you have to ...

• Cooperatives are divided into productive and distributive cooperatives, depending on whether they are responsible for the production and sale of member products promote (dairy recycling) or want to make the consumption and other needs of the comrades cheap (Purchasing cooperatives).
• You are probably familiar with the credit unions, which appear primarily as Volksbanks and Raiffeisenbanks. Its founding purpose was to obtain cheap loans for the comrades.
• There are also raw material associations (joint, affordable purchasing), building cooperatives (associations for the production of apartments), Productive cooperatives (winegrowers' cooperatives) or sales cooperatives (joint sale of agricultural Products).

This is how you become a comrade

• If you want to become a member of a cooperative, you have to declare your membership. In contrast to the stock corporation or GmbH, no specific share capital or share capital is prescribed. When the number of open members fluctuates the amount of the cooperative's assets.
• With your declaration of membership, you make a payment on your business share. The business share quantifies the maximum amount up to which the members can participate in the cooperative. As a member, you can acquire several company shares as cooperative shares.
• While the business share expresses the maximum opportunity to participate, the minimum investment quantifies the amount of the payment on the business share to which each comrade is obliged. You must commit to paying in at least one tenth of the business share.
• The business credit indicates your actual credit as a member. It is the investment changed by profit and loss. From the point of view of creditor protection, the law prohibits the payment of credit before you leave the cooperative.
• You are not personally liable to the creditors, only the assets of the cooperative.

The district court keeps a register of cooperatives

• The register of cooperatives is kept at the local court. There you will be entered in the list of members when you join the cooperative
• You acquire membership in the cooperative either when the cooperative is founded or when you join the existing cooperative at a later date.

Membership is not transferable and conditionally inheritable

• You cannot transfer your membership in a cooperative. It is only conditionally hereditary. If you bless the temporal, your membership will pass to your heirs upon your death, but it will end at the end of the financial year in which you died.
• Regardless of this, you can transfer your business credit at any time, provided that the purchaser is already a member of the cooperative or will become a member.
• You lose your membership through your death, through voluntary resignation in the form of a termination as well as permissible assignment of your business assets or by foreclosure if you fail to meet your cooperative obligations fulfill.
• In practical life, too, it is good to know exactly what cooperative shares are. Because if you want to become a customer of a bank that operates as a registered cooperative, for example, you usually have to acquire a share in the cooperative and become a member