Transfer of company ownership
A businesswoman in the region would like to retire and hand over her business. However, she is concerned that her employees should not be laid off.
The CPO takes over the existing business as a contribution in kind and in return gives newly created joint-ownership certificates with the equivalent value to the previous owner. The community finds a new chief executive for the business and provides its own experts so that the handover and the re-orientation towards a long-term viable way of doing business can take place as smoothly as possible.
The previous owner has several possibilities for using her new joint-ownership certificates (which can also be combined):
- She can sell them on the pound or dollar based market in order to use the proceeds, for example to pay off a mortgage on her house.
- She can sell them one by one for Groks on the marketplace of the market community, in order to purchase goods and services she needs in her daily life. The price of the certificates is negotiatiable, as with all other market trades.
- She can trade a number of them for Groks on the marketplace, and then lend the Groks to a new long-term viable project – she may also wish to work part-time on the project herself.
- If she does not wish to "sell" her certificates, she can as a guarantor deposit them for the account of another community member. Thus Groks can come into existence, backed by her certificates, for which she herself does not pay the circulation safeguard fee – a sort of interest-free long-term loan. The favoured member could for example be an initiative to erect locally situated wind turbines, i.e. she has the option to support increased resilience of her home district.
- She can deposit them for a high credit limit on her own Grok market account, and use it for other business purposes. She can thus continue to make her knowledge and abilities available to the market community on a part-time basis, and use the Groks earned in this way to meet her daily needs. Furthermore, in this case she receives an unconditional basic income, if the general meeting of the CPO has decided to provide one.