RE: Petitions - Company law.1 May 2023 16:53
If you're suggesting that owners of ordinary shares should be given a legal right to ownership in a company, it's balderdash, and it will never happen. Your share certificate is just that, and not a certificate of ownership. Have you ever seen a certificate state you are a legal owner of any description? Nope. The certificate does not convey any rights to ownership nor will it. Also, ordinary shareholders are not explosed to the liabilities of the company, which to a certain extent the directors are, through their fiduciary duties and obligations and for this reason, they carry indemnity insurance. It would mean each and every ordinary class shareholder would have to take out indemnity insurance to cover their backs, which would be a colossal cost, and the reason this is highly unlikely to happen is, that you would have to take such indemnity insurance for each and every company you bought shares in so the insurer could assess the risks of each company separately, and as ordinary shareholders tend to stay invested sometimes for seconds, minutes, sometimes hours, days, weeks, and may be years, the majority only stay in for a very short time, and so it would be nigh on impossible to effect such insurance. Directors have set periods that they hold tenure and that is the very reason why, mainly for indemnity insurance purposes, otherwise indemnity premiums would be sky high. Directors therefore take full control of a company and that will never change. It's up to an individual shareholder as to whether they invest in the company or not, and how long they decide to stay invested, which in some cases, can be just seconds! Directors can't just sell out and walk away in the same way that shareholders can if the going gets tough! The law will not change on this.