Acceso usuarios
Wolf Georg Ringe
The contestability of shareholder resolutions is a perennial problem in corporate law – effective minority protection needs to be carefully balanced with the risk of abuse. An analysis of the approach of English law may inform the policy debate in other legal systems. English law has effectively eliminated the risk of abuse with a number of simple and pragmatic steps.
In a nutshell, errors in formal resolutions can hardly ever be challenged, unless the claimant can demonstrate an underlying intentional disadvantage. But even substantive errors in resolutions are rarely conducive to a successful challenge. Instead, English law has developed a number of alternative mechanisms – often beyond our traditional understanding of law – which address the problem.
Minority shareholders of a UK company have a variety of ways to make their concerns heard. They may seek a declaratory judgment confirming the invalidity of the shareholders’ resolution due to procedural irregularities. Further, they may rely on the traditional shareholder lawsuit (derivative action) or the remedy for unfair prejudice. For each of these remedies, English law succeeds in limiting actionable situations to those where the claimant has been substantially wronged, while also filtering out those situations where a challenge would be arbitrary or vexatious. The more developed capital market in the UK and informal strategic shareholder influence are additional considerations that allow for greater flexibility in the British context.
