Please get it that we're distinguishing between LEGAL authority and ORGANIZATIONAL implementation, which was the whole purpose to establish the HiFo since being a legal person owning assets suggests you shouldn't change those every 6 months, while the organizational aspects were implemeted by rules like (even in MCeV) "The Board of Directors executes the Council's [...] rulings.
The fact that HiFo BoD (eventually MCeV BoD resp "the complete legal person 'MC e.V.', or did HiFo already transfer assets despite the whole thing not yet discussed and agreed upon proper regulations, at all?) legally OWNS the assets doesn't automatically imply that this BoD is ENTITLED by community to do whatever they like. Despite win7mac et al now trying to push for exactly this "we do whatever we like, since we are legally responsible". The organizational details are mostly not really dealt with in the bylaws which are first and foremost for the legal part, rather the organization got negotiated and discussed by community in the usual community channels (based on what I called "good will / cooperation"). Now fighting for organizational changes by (ab)using the only legally relevant bylaws means disregarding the community and the decision it made back when.
When community who discussed and finally voted for HiFo thought it would obsolete Council and take over Council's responsibilities and duties, then why did community install TWO entities to start with, instead of simply redefining Council into HiFo foundation resp creating HiFo and same time abolishing Council? Community decided to have TWO entities (or rather a discernible dedicated already existing sub-entity of the whole thing), so don't you think they should be complementary like MCeV council and MCe.V. BoD, rather than competing against each other inside same e.V./foundation? AFAIK even Nokia insisted in HiFo at least for one year keeping council alive, in a sidenote in the still NDAed contracts - probably inspired by Rob taking same approach of "now we own maemo, we do with it what we like".
HiFo and MCe.V. both have a "council" as only previously existing sub-entity even installed by those entities' bylaws. I don't think abolishing that council sub-entity is even possible, and the question who tells whom what to do seemed to be pretty obvious to everybody until Rob started to reject Maemo Council being HiFo council as well, and insisted in elections for said HiFo council.

In short Maemo Council doesn't "have authority over HiFo", it rather has some non-legal-level but nevertheless binding (and backed up by proper elections, by whole community) authority inside HiFo/e.V. over the BoD, since the Council is a part of HiFo and actually already also of MCe.V.

In its role as Maemo Community Council it's bound to obey the 5 years old (though updated) Maemo Council Rules. In its role as MCe.V. council is bound to obey the MCeV bylaws. We cannot do something that is allowed by one of those regulations when it's forbidden by the other one - though according to win7mac's holy vow that should never happen to become a real problem since both sets of rules are 100% compatible. I think a "the general assembly can change council rules by a 2/3 majority (OWTTE)" is already NOT compatible to "Changes to any of the above rules must be approved by community referendum." in http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Coun...ection_process.
Generally nothing would be wrong with MCeV when it had no GA that clearly conflicts with Maemo Council Rules (and that can't get fixed thanks to German laws). The only way to cure things and get them on rails again: Limit the power of GA instead of trying to boost it. We already have a working "General Assembly" of whole maemo community, called "vote / referendum". We don't need any better concept replacing it, and actually trying to do so is the root cause of all problems. Limit the number of GA-members allowed in MCeV to maybe a 10 persons, who maybe even get elected by community vote before MCeV accepts them as regular members, and have those 10 people promise to *cooperate* with council and community instead of fighting against them, and everything should be fine for the next 10 years. It can be done! MCeV BoD has the power to reject any memberships(!) according to result of maemo community elections voting for a few community members who become regular members of e.V., there's no German law I know of that forbids, and there's also no law that forbids those regular members in their application to the community election giving such promise to cooperate.
Thinking of it, such limited-number-of-members elected-by-community General Assembly could fit pretty nicely into the (now obsolete) role description of the Nokia Community Manager to replace it, stepping in when things go completely haywire but the rest of the time simply staying in background and let community do their thing.