This discussion was moved from the board meeting to instead take place purely on Discourse due to time constraints at the meeting.
The Swiss pirates failed to pay their PPEU memberships for 2022 and 2023 in time, and as a consequence their membership automatically lapsed at the beginning of this year, in accordance with the statutes of the organization. Since then they have paid these overdue Membership fees, as well as what is intended as their 2024 fee.
Going through old communication with them it seems that they had technical problems with their payment in previous years, with their bank refusing to accept that the PPEU Iban was from a Czech bank while the PPEU address is in Luxembourg. They reached out to us about this problem already in early 2023, but due to some issues with the handover from one PPEU Treasurer to the next we failed to follow up on this in time.
So right now the situation is that we have a Swiss Pirate party that wants to be a member and who has paid all old fees they owned us, and a board and Member parties who wants them as Members. However, the statutes give us no room for flexibility here, since they didn’t pay on time, they are unfortunately not currently a Member organization.
A possible solution to this problem would be to have our chair write to them to apologize for the lack of follow up on our side when they reported their payments problem in 2023, and to invite them to reapply for membership before our next Council meeting.