Hello Anthony,
answering your questions:
> Certificates tax and social security
> Our Spanish legal team requested if you could provide us with a certificate from the tax and social security administration confirming Blitworks’ current status (basically proof there are no outstanding debts in this respect)
- I have already asked for the certificate, will forward it to you asap.
> Employees
> Based on the previous conversation, we got copy of the employment contracts and you confirmed there are no additional documents (like staff handbook) or policies in place.
Could you give us some information on how currently the following employee topics are handled within Blitworks:
- Although we don't have a staff handbook, we have a collection of internal documents that covers holidays request procedure, e-mail and company resources usage and communication.
> Overtime
- We have barely needed to do overtime at BW, so this is something we have not needed to arrange.
> What’s the current situation with holiday ? Do people have a lot of holiday carried over from 2020 ? What’s Blitworks’ policy on carrying over holiday ?
- Most of the people has already used their 2020 holidays. Our policy is that we let them use on 2021 until the end of March (three months at the beginning of each year), except for exceptional situations.
> Do employees have restrictions on non-compete or non-poaching post termination of their contracts ? Is there a written policy on this, or is there a basis in Spanish law;
- We have an NDA signed with all our employees handling confidentiality and exclusivity while working at BlitWorks, but no post termination of their contracts is covered on this document.
> Same question on the topic of confidentiality
Wages: what’s the system of indexing wages ? Are there any wage increases to be expected based on the current employees’ terms ?
- Wages are agreed when joining BlitWorks based on experience and capacities of each employee and there is no legally binding requirement (more on this later) to increase salaries because of seniority.
- Increases are based on productivity and offered to each employee when we think it makes sense.
- About legally binding wages increases, it's established by the labour department but it applies to the base salary only. In practice, we never applied that increase because the base salary is really low (defined by employee category) and it's complemented by a voluntary improvement from the company.
- This bring up another topic, which is that we think some of the key members of the team are underpaid and it will be necessary to offer then an improvement. We can discuss this whenever you want.
> Accountant
> As we set up our Spanish Larian entity, we will need a local accountant, who we may also ask to act as Company Secretary. Is this something the current Blitworks’ accountant could help us with ? If so, could you get us in contact with them for an introductory call ?
- All the legal aspects of the company (taxes, payrolls, etc) are handled by a local accountant company, but they are mostly doing work as requested, the real office management is done by Geraldine, who also does some PR/Marketing tasks for our publishing side. We understand you're interested in talking with Gerald, right?
> Location/Lease agreement
> We briefly touched on Larian subleasing the current Blitworks location in the start up phase. Do you know if this is allowed under your current lease agreement ? What’s the remaining term of your lease ? Can you share your agreement with us ?
- We're not sure we can sublease the office (we will check), but we have a good relationship with the landlord, so we're sure we can arrange anything that we need, as soon as it's reasonable.
- The office rental contract includes a pre-notice of 6 months before leaving (which I'm pretty sure we can negotiate), but in any case we were planning to schedule around it. I mean, we were planning to spend at least 6 months just for finishing the current projects, so we need the current infrastructure (servers, IP's, etc) working for at least that time.
- At this point we're only using the office just to keep some hardware that is remotely controlled, the servers and things like that.
- In order to build a proper Larian office, our current office won't work, but, it may be useful in the first months before a proper office is found, mainly to do interviews/meetings or even to act as a pure legal address. If that's the case, we don't have a problem sharing the space. The office has 24h security and it's in the center of the city, so it could be really useful for a brief period of time. Our office is actually comprised of two separate offices merged together, so we can split it again and have each company rent a half of it (we did that in the past when we had two separate companies)