After the COVID-19 outbreak, a number of business operators were forced to react to the situation by reducing the number of workers or staff they employed. For the labour courts and labour officers, one important point related to such reductions is whether employers have paid the correct amount of severance, remuneration in lieu of advance notice, and overtime payments to their employees.

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in widespread economic turmoil, with quarantines, business closures, and precipitous declines in consumer and business spending causing momentous shifts in previously sound business models. This has already resulted in various business emergencies, from layoffs and broken supply chains to outright insolvency. This challenging environment seems to signal a bleak outlook for the foreseeable future, but distressed businesses—and their creditors—can take some comfort in knowing that bankruptcy laws around the world are designed for just such circumstances.

Recent amendments to Thailand’s Civil Procedure Code (CPC) will allow parties to submit a matter for court-supervised mediation prior to the actual filing of the case. Encouraging mediation prior to filing a complaint is intended to save time and resources that would otherwise be expended on a trial.These changes are contained in the Act Amending the Civil Procedure Code (No. 32) B.E. 2563 (2020), which was published in the Government Gazette on September 8, 2020, and will apply to all disputes from November 7, 2020, onward. 

In response to the recent uptick in cases of COVID-19 found in Myanmar, and concern about the disease’s spread, all branches of Myanmar’s Office of Registration and Deeds (ORD) have temporarily ceased accepting declarations.

With many employees in Thailand working outside their company’s normal IT security fence, their increased use of their own computers and devices instead of those in their offices with standard or enhanced security mechanisms has made it more challenging for employers to control access to key business information. In the rush to set up a fully or partially remote workforce, most companies have had little time to establish work-from-home guidelines on protection of their valuable intangible assets like trade secrets and confidential business information.

Are importers and distributors responsible for patent infringement related to the products they import and distribute? This seemingly simple question has still only been partially answered in Vietnam, when the Superior People’s Court of Ho Chi Minh City rendered a judgment on 28 July 2020 sending a case back to the first-instance court for a retrial.

Cambodia’s new Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism Law (the “2020 AML/CFT Law”) came into force in June 2020, abrogating the 2007 law of the same name and the accompanying sub-decree from 2013.The 2020 AML/CFT Law differs in three major ways from the 2007 law: (1) more specific definitions, (2) a requirement for reporting entities to introduce enhanced due diligence measures, and (3) increased penalties for non-compliance.Altered Definitions of Legal Terms

By recommendation of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Thailand is preparing to amend the Anti-Money Laundering Act B.E. 2542 (1999) (AMLA) and the Counter Terrorism and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction Financing Act B.E. 2559 (2016) in order to be consistent with international standards. The public hearing on the draft acts was completed on June 15, 2020, and the laws will now continue through the cabinet and parliament. Key Draft Amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering Act