A semigroup which is
embeddable into a completely simple semigroup satisfies some weak cancellation laws
(C). Conversely, if S is a semigroup which generates a variety which does not contain
the variety of left regular bands nor the variety of right regular bands, then S is
embeddable into a completely simple semigroup if it satisfies the laws (C). This result
is used to characterize the subsemigroups of completely simple semigroups over
nilpotent groups of class n.