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This book focuses on the legitimacy of corporate power wielded by corporate groups, integrating legal doctrine, economic analysis, and theoretical approaches. It reassesses how corporate groups can maintain legitimacy whilst exercising corporate power.Corporate groups are a prominent commercial feature of many jurisdictions and present unique challenges. The book argues that when analysed through the lens of corporate social responsibility, a legitimacy deficiency emerges. This arises from a lack of historical debate, diluted control mechanisms, and inflated growth, utilising unique features of the corporate group. It explores how the magnified power of the corporate group presents acute challenges for corporate legitimacy. Data is utilised alongside current examples of corporate groups which identify structural architectural patterns. It explores new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and blockchain as ways of attaining legitimacy. It presents methods of attaining legitimacy for the continued wielding of power to be held within corporate groups.This book spans several research interests under the corporate law umbrella. It will be of interest to traditional black letter company lawyers. Additionally, it will be of interest to those who have an interest in business and those who are interested in the role of technology.

Agency theory is ubiquitous in company law. This book explores (a) the limits of such deployment, and (b) the logic of how to deploy it.The book makes five linked arguments in respect of the limits of agency theory in company law. First, it argues that agency theory has become so broad that it can be used to analyse most human relationships. Such breadth, though, comes at the expense of legal clarity: as agency relationships cover such a broad range of relationships, there are no normative legal conclusions that can be drawn merely from identifying such a relationship. Second, it argues that we need to differentiate more specific concepts with clearer legal implications, such as externalities, and the particular manifestation of moral hazard that appears in insurance dynamics. Third, it argues that considerable amounts of existing company law theory - which is ostensibly built from agency theory - is in fact based on a series of hidden value judgments at each stage of the analysis. Fourth, it argues that company law theory should use agency theory less to rebalance the discipline: agency theory has become hegemonic, which is dangerous for the discipline, obscures company law's role in establishing incentives, undermines accountability, and reduces company law's autonomy.The book then moves to the logic of agency theory and makes three arguments. First, it argues that we need to factor in the company, only apply agency theory to voluntary interactions, and foreground our value judgments when identifying agency relations to do it properly. Second, it argues that it is rational to incur agency costs when we perceive the benefits of doing so to outweigh the costs, meaning that agency costs can be facilitative and we should look to front-end them rather than universally minimise them. Third, it argues that this needs to be undertaken through mandatory laws.Exploring the external limits and internal logic of agency cost analysis, this book will be of interest to academics, students, and researchers of corporate and company law.

Current advancements in civil rights and environmental activism emphasize the crucial importance of making environmental information widely available to the public, regardless of whether it is in the hands of the government or of corporations, especially when the information is needed to understand and prevent risks for human health and the environment. In the wake of a resurgence of environmental and civil rights activism, conflicts flare between the right of the people to know and the right of private actors to keep certain information hidden, mostly for commercial reasons. This book offers a detailed comparative analysis of how environmental information is being accessed in different countries and jurisdictions, and how these issues are currently being handled by judges and governments. Focusing on the right of access to environmental information held and produced by private actors and the legal issues that emerge when other values and rights are compromised, this book offers an alternative framework to improve on current legal systems, suggesting a more nuanced and balanced approach that takes both set of interests duly into consideration. Providing an integrated approach to public environmental law and private commercial law, the book integrates the arguments from both sides to establish a common ground, defining shared principles and models that provide a solid basis for a robust new system. Reviewing access to private sector information at a truly international level, this book will be relevant to students, academics and practitioners working in these areas.

Recent financial crisis and the global financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought renewed interest to the regulation and practice of corporate insolvency and restructuring.Modernisation of the insolvency profession, and the regulation of its practitioners, is a contemporary concern and recent years have seen significant reforms of insolvency law. The success of such reforms can be enhanced through a clear understanding of difficulties faced by the insolvency profession in achieving successful restructuring and insolvency outcomes and through the determination of effective solutions to those difficulties. However, there is limited empirical data to inform the day-to-day practice of insolvency, nor the difficulties experienced by insolvency practitioners in pursing insolvency and restructuring solutions. This book addresses this absence of data and understanding, examining the role and practice of corporate insolvency practitioners and exploring the challenges that they encounter.Offering an empirical study together with a comparative analysis of the experiences of practitioners around the world, this book facilitates a greater understanding of corporate insolvency practice, confronting a misunderstanding of, and under-confidence in, corporate insolvency practitioners, making it key reading for academics, practitioners and regulators working in the area of corporate insolvency.

The plot of the book is about how the rule of law functions to protect corporate structures that facilitate the commission of globalized fraud and abuse. The rules of law are used to dilute and hide accountability of high managerial agents and controlling persons, performing as a tool in aid of centralized and concentrated capital interests, devouring and destabilizing small-to-medium-sized companies. The theories and concepts developed in the book chapters are explored then applied to a real case and controversy—a mega-fraudulent bankruptcy in Argentina. In the zone of the world's largest grain manufacturing and exporting port complex, the VICENTIN SAIC default illustrates poignantly the premises of the book. The book will be a good tool to illustrate to students how globalized financial capitalism may perform predation of other actors in a given domestic real economy; what are the origins and abuses of corporate law in the transnational context; what factors influence the economies of emergent countries in Latin America; and what should be the protective role of law. These concepts can be learned and applied in higher education and post-degree students through this study of allegations of mega-fraud arising from the VICENTIN complex of companies based in Argentina, including consideration of the role of Glencore Ltd.

This book draws together themes in business model developments in relation to decentralised business models (DBMs), sometimes referred to as the ‘sharing'economy, to systematically analyse the challenges to corporate and organisational law and governance.DBMs include business networks, the global supply chain, public–private partnerships, the platform economy and blockchain-based enterprises. The law of organisational forms and governance has been slow in responding to changes, and reliance has been placed on innovations in contract law to support the business model developments. The authors argue that the law of organisations and governance can respond to changes in the phenomenon of decentralised business models driven by transformative technology and new socio-economic dynamics. They argue that principles underlying the law of organisations and governance, such as corporate governance, are crucial to constituting, facilitating and enabling reciprocality, mutuality, governance and redress in relation to these business models, the wealth-creation of which subscribes to neither a firm nor market system, is neither hierarchical nor totally decentralised, and incorporates socio-economic elements that are often enmeshed with incentives and relations. Of interest to academics, policymakers and legal practitioners, this book offers proposals for new thinking in the law of organisation and governance to advance the possibilities of a new socio-economic future.

This book tracks the phenomenon of international corporate personhood (ICP) in international law and explores many legal issues raised in its wake. It sketches a theory of the ICP and encourages engagement with its amorphous legal nature through reimagination of international law beyond the State, in service to humanity.The book offers two primary contributions, one descriptive and one normative. The descriptive section of the book sketches a history of the emergence of the ICP and discusses existing analogical approaches to theorizing the corporation in international law. It then turns to an analysis of the primary judicial decisions and international legal instruments that animate internationally a concept that began in U.S. domestic law. The descriptive section concludes with a list of twenty-two judge-made and text-made rights and privileges presently available to the ICP that are not available to other international legal personalities; these are later categorized into ‘active'and ‘passive'rights. The normative section of the book begins the shift from what is to what ought to be by sketching a theory of the ICP that – unlike existing attempts to place the corporation in international legal theory – does not rely on analogical reasoning. Rather, it adopts the Jessupian emphasis on ‘human problems'and encourages pragmatic, solution-oriented legal analysis and interpretation, especially in arbitral tribunals and international courts where legal reasoning is frequently borrowed from domestic law and international treaty regimes. It suggests that ICPs should have ‘passive'or procedural rights that cater to problems that can be characterized as ‘universal'but that international law should avoid universalizing ‘active'or substantive rights which ICPs can shape through agency. The book concludes by identifying new trajectories in law relevant to the future and evolution of the ICP.This book will be most useful to students and practitioners of international law but provides riveting material for anyone interested in understanding the phenomenon of international corporate personhood or the international law surrounding corporations more generally.

Historically, the Christian tradition has played an influential role in Western economic thought concerning the regulation of markets, but, with the fracturing of the Christian tradition following the Reformation, the decline of Christian influence in academia, and the increasing specialization of economic analysis, that influence has become increasingly opaque. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of prominent academic experts on market regulation from four different continents and various faith traditions to reconsider the impact of Christianity on market regulation. Drawing on law, economics, history, theology, philosophy, and political theory, the authors consider both general questions of market regulation and particular regulatory fields such as bankruptcy, corporate law, and antitrust from a Christian perspective.

Manuela Sixt untersucht das grundsätzliche Spannungsverhältnis, in dem Whistleblowing steht, anhand der Dimensionen Macht, Geheimnis und Information. Dargestellt wird das Spannungsverhältnis sowohl aus der Perspektive von Arbeitnehmern als auch von Beamten. Auf diese Weise werden arbeitsrechtliche, beamtenrechtliche, geheimnisschutzrechtliche und auch datenschutzrechtliche Aspekte eingehend erläutert und die Thematik Whistleblowing umfassend betrachtet. In einem Modellgesetz, dem die hochaktuelle EU-Hinweisgeberrichtlinie zugrunde liegt, werden die gewonnen Ergebnisse zusammengeführt.

The book introduces the model of the corporate compliance officer under US, UK and German law and practice. It aims to analyze the compliance function within private sector companies in the three selected jurisdictions in order to present a model of the German Compliance Officer. There is little uniformity and standardization of the German compliance function outside the banking sector. It has been recognized that a generally applicable definition of the compliance function is as yet absent. There is a need for a generally applicable definition and a modern understanding of the role of the compliance officer. This is why this book is intended to bridge the gap in knowledge concerning the applicable legal standards required to ensure the effectiveness of this position. As such, it may be useful to examine the legal environment of the compliance function outside of the German framework and to explore the professional status and role of the corporate compliance officer in other countries, such as in the US and the UK.

Geraten zu einer Unternehmensgruppe verbundene Rechtsträger in die Insolvenz, stellt dies nicht nur für die Beteiligten, sondern auch für das Insolvenzrecht eine große Herausforderung dar. Mit dem Ziel, insbesondere die speziell aus der Gruppenverbundenheit resultierenden Werte in und über die Insolvenz hinaus zu bewahren, stehen die auf die Einzelinsolvenz zugeschnittenen Regelungen der InsO und der EuInsVO seit langem auf dem Prüfstand. Der Autor untersucht die dahingehenden deutschen Reformansätze sowie die neuen Regelungen der EuInsVO. Dabei zeigt er, dass der Schlüssel zur erfolgreichen Bewältigung von Insolvenzen innerhalb einer Unternehmensgruppe vorrangig in einer Zuständigkeitskonzentration liegt; und zwar sowohl auf Gerichts-, als auch auf Verwalterebene.

Weder die Betreuungsbedürftigkeit noch die Geschäftsunfähigkeit eines Gesellschafters führen zu seinem Ausschluss aus der Personengesellschaft. Um die Bestellung eines Betreuers zu vermeiden, werden vermehrt Vorsorgevollmachten verwendet. Der Autor beschäftigt sich mit der Vereinbarkeit dieser – mit Eintritt der Geschäftsunfähigkeit – faktisch unwiderruflichen Vollmachten mit den personengesellschaftsrechtlichen Grundsätzen, insbesondere mit dem Abspaltungsverbot. Hierzu werden Vergleiche zu anderen Fällen der Fremdverwaltung von Gesellschafterrechten, wie der Betreuung und der Testamentsvollstreckung, gezogen. Damit ein Vorsorgebevollmächtigter aber sämtliche Gesellschafterrechte ausüben kann, ist die Zustimmung aller Mitgesellschafter erforderlich.

Die Insolvenzanfechtung ist ein wichtiges Instrument, um die Insolvenzmasse zu mehren. Der Autor beschäftigt sich mit den Mitteln, die dem Insolvenzverwalter zur Ermittlung und gerichtsfesten Substantiierung von Insolvenzanfechtungsansprüchen zur Verfügung stehen. Dabei geht er in einem ersten Schritt nicht nur auf die Auskunftspflichten des Anfechtungsgegners ein. Der Autor nimmt vielmehr auch insolvenzspezifische Informations- und Auskunftsquellen des Insolvenzverwalters sowie zu seinen Gunsten bestehende gesetzliche und richterrechtliche Beweiserleichterungen in den Blick. In einem zweiten Schritt entwickelt er anhand der gewonnen Erkenntnisse einen vorbereitenden Auskunftsanspruch gegen Anfechtungsgegner.

Wenn Aufsichtsratsmitglieder einer Aktiengesellschaft Mehrfachmandate bei Konkurrenzunternehmen wahrnehmen, kann dies die Arbeit des Aufsichtsrats beeinträchtigen. Es entstehen Interessenkonflikte. Die Autorin betrachtet zunächst den Umgang mit dieser Fallkonstellation nach der derzeitigen Rechtslage. Sodann wird untersucht, wie mit Mehrfachmandaten bei konkurrierenden Unternehmen in der Zukunft umgegangen werden könnte. Als Ergebnis schlägt die Autorin die Einführung einer gesetzlichen Regelung vor.

Der Autor widmet sich der Frage, ob die Thesaurierungspflicht geeignet ist, das verminderte Stammkapital der UG (haftungsbeschränkt) auszugleichen. Für deren Beantwortung erfolgt eine kurze Auseinandersetzung mit dessen Sinnhaftigkeit unter Beachtung ausländischer Haftungssysteme. Er kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass lediglich eine bedingte Kompensation besteht. Als Lösung schlägt er u.a. vor, §§ 30, 31 GmbHG sowohl analog als auch direkt anzuwenden. Einen Hauptteil des Buches nehmen die Auseinandersetzungen ein, wie mit überhöhten Geschäftsführergehältern umzugehen und wie der Einsatz der UG als Komplementärin ohne Kapitalanteil zu bewerten ist. Der Autor zieht die Grundsätze der steuerrechtlichen verdeckten Gewinnausschüttung heran und wendet als Umgehungsschutz § 300 AktG analog an.

This book examines the extent to which international law places obligations directly on corporate entities. It is often argued that corporations are bound by, inter alia, the same human rights and environmental obligations that states have. This book examines the source of these supposed obligations in treaty law, international custom, and in internationalized contracts, to determine whether they really can be transposed to corporations so easily. The focus of the book is on the regulation by international law of private corporate conduct. It examines whether corporate obligations, namely obligations binding directly upon a corporation under positive international law, have indeed emerged, and if so, whether corporations may be systemically included in the predominantly state-centric framework of international law. It investigates the challenges facing international law as a result of the potential emergence of corporate obligations, and engages in a structural analysis of what corporate obligations under international human rights law might entail. Ultimately, it warns against conceptualizing corporations as both holders and potential violators of human rights, explaining why they are not automatically bound by the same obligations that are imposed on states.

Pour les pays les moins avancés, le développement est devenu une véritable hantise. Les acteurs politiques, conscients de la nature de la société commerciale comme principale entité de production de richesse, ne cessent de la prôner comme un pôle de développement. Mais le droit commercial l'érige souvent en puissance opposée à la puissance publique, aux droits des individus et même aux droits de l'homme. Les systèmes français et européen ont été analysés en comparaison avec le système du droit commercial des pays pauvres d'Afrique, l'OHADA.

Far from regarding the law as supreme, corporations approach law as an element of executive thought and action aimed at optimizing competitiveness. The objective of this book is to identify, explore and define corporate legal strategies that seek advantage in the opportunities revealed when the Law is perceived as a resource to be mobilized and aligned with the firm's business and economic agendas.

The process of economic globalization, as product and capital markets have become increasingly integrated since WWII, has placed huge, and it is argued by some, irresistible pressures on the world's'insider'stakeholder oriented corporate governance systems. Insider corporate governance systems in countries such as Germany, so the argument goes, should converge or be transformed by global product and capital market pressures to the'superior'shareholder oriented'outsider'corporate governance model prevalent in the UK and the US. What these pressures from globalization are, how they manifest themselves, whether they are likely to cause such a convergence/transformation and whether these pressures will continue, lie at the heart of the exploration in this volume. The Globalization of Corporate Governance provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of the key corporate governance systems in the UK, the US and Germany from the perspective of the development of economic globalization. As such it is a valuable resource for those interested in how economic and legal reforms interact to produce change within corporate governance systems.

Professor Cheffins'lecture offers a path-breaking examination of potential trajectories for legal scholarship. Considerable attention is devoted to academic writing on law, but little has been said about the process by which the relevant literature evolves. This lecture focuses directly on the evolution of legal scholarship. It identifies five potential trajectories, revolving around concepts such as'progress','paradigms', the marketplace for ideas, intellectual cycles, and fads and fashions. Professor Cheffins offers a summary of each trajectory and then tests the propositions he has advanced by means of a case study dealing with corporate law. He argues that scholarly trends in law develop in a manner that is at least partially consistent with each of the trajectories he identifies, but acknowledges that none captures fully the dynamics at work.

Markets for capital, products, and managerial talent are expanding rapidly across national borders, yet domestic laws and practices have never had greater impact on corporate structures and cross-border deals. Investors pursuing high returns and diversification, entrepreneurs seeking capital, and managers endeavoring to restructure troubled enterprises now routinely face transaction counter-parties who operate within different legal and political systems, and who rank social priorities quite differently. This dynamic tension between global markets and domestic institutions fuels the debate on corporate governance reform now raging in virtually every region of the world. It also frames the intellectual agenda of the distinguished contributors to this volume, who examine such issues as the possible convergence of corporate governance practices around the world, national variations in the quality of corporate law, and the fiduciary responsibilities corporate managers around the world owe to their shareholders. Among the book's many insights is the contention that'globalization'and'global markets'are misleading terms, because they mask the local quality of much of the activity occurring within those rubrics. Case studies focus on France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the transition economies of Eastern Europe.