Why and how would shareholders pay fines for a company? Recently I read an article on a PG&amp;E settlement which stated that PG&amp;E shareholders would pay a $40 million fine and spend another $85 million Why is the fine being levied on PG&amp;E shareholders? Isn't the owner of a share not supposed to be liable for company debts? Furthermore, how would this fine be carried out? Is every individual shareholder being sent a bill based on their percent ownership of the company?
They aren’t The journalist is attributing a payment by the company as a cost to the shareholders. In accounting terms, that’s a fair equivalency - the shareholder’s equity will fall by the amount of the liability. In legal terms, it isn’t - the company is a seperate legal entity from the shareholders and a payment by one is not a payment by the other, even though for each shareholder, the value of their shares will change. However, markets being what they are, the change in value is unlikely to be exactly the same as the amount the company pays, the value may even rise if the market expected the costs to be bigger than they are. They may rise even if the actual costs are bigger than the expectation - markets prefer certainty over uncertainty even in bad news. Of course, the bulk of the actual cost is likely to be borne by PG&amp;E’s insurers.
If the employee has the choice - bonus and membership, or no bonus - then I expect the offer to be legal. Since it is a real bonus and part of your salary you will have to pay income tax on it. What might be illegal, but not your concern, is if your company tells investors how well the company is doing, and how well the membership scheme is doing, when in reality 80% of members are employees paying effectively nothing.
The court in France would not enforce a debt collection against you; but the person who owed you the money could - very easily. They would apply to the court in Scotland to enforce the judgement of the French court, the Scottish court would look at it, say "yup, the French court has made a decision", and then tell you to pay up. After that, the French company has the same range of options as a Scottish company would. I think (but I could be wrong), that the decision of the French court might well not go on your credit record - but the corresponding decision of the Scottish court would. Note that a CCJ doesn't go on your credit record if you pay within a short period (seven days?). In your case though, the right thing to do is Pay the amount you don't dispute you owe Wait for them to sue (they may well not). Defend the case (probably in writing, not in person). If you lose, pay up straight away (at this point the court has decided that you were wrong, and you do owe the money. As such you should pay.)
What you describe is forbidden by corporate law in every jurisdiction with which I'm familiar. I don't know the law in Quebec, but in principle: An entity in control of a corporation can't use that control to unjustly enrich himself at the expense of other shareholders. (If he does so through deceit then he is committing the common law tort of fraud, and quite likely a criminal offense.) A trustee or fiduciary that uses his control of assets to enrich himself at the expense of those to whom he owes a duty (e.g., minority shareholders) is guilty of various statutory offenses, among which may be "Breach of Fiduciary Duty" and "Fraudulent transfer." Sales of corporate assets in general must be done through an "arms-length" mechanism. If they are being auctioned off, and the auction isn't open, so that an insider is able to purchase them below "fair market value," then, once again, a fraud has been committed. The grading and remedies vary by jurisdiction. Of course, whether it's worth pursuing a remedy through legal action depends (as always) on: the amount at stake, the cost of pursuing the remedy, statutory allowances for punitive damages, the likelihood and cost of collecting on any judgement won. Only a lawyer familiar with the jurisdiction, the complaint, and the corporation's governing documents could help you answer that question.
We have made a complaint about this decision to the local administrative and highest courts of Finland. Both of these courts rejected our complaint (the highest court rejected our right to even file a complaint!) without even looking into the details of the matter at hand. Did you hire a lawyer? If the court rejected your complaint without even considering it, it may have been procedurally improper. Generally speaking, once your complaint is rejected by a court with proper jurisdiction, the matter is resolved and you lost. End of story, too bad. You have no recourse but to accept the action of the local government as lawful even though you believe that your case was wrongfully decided. In any case, I doubt that the local government's action in your context is illegal. This is an issue of "condemnation" and not zoning. Generally speaking, the government has a power of eminent domain to seize property for a public use so long as a process is in place for the owner to obtain compensation for the seizure. A government owned recreation center would generally be considered a public use. Certainly, nothing you have described would violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, 2010/C 83/02, Article 17. As you note: No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss. This is a case where the deprivation is in the public interest, in which the Finnish courts have decided that the conditions provided by law for doing so have been met, and in which you acknowledge that you have a right to compensation. Since it appears that the compensation has not yet been determined, it is premature to say that the compensation you receive will not be fair or paid in good time, and you need to participate actively and vigorously in the compensation process to make sure that you do make the best case you can for fair compensation. Also, as you note, this has happened many times in Finland. This strongly support the conclusion that this action is legal under Finnish law, even if you would prefer to interpret its laws in another manner. Of course the compulsory purchase will not be paid with a fair market price but with a much lower price, which is technically a legalized robbery as it has many times occurred in similar cases in Finland. My next step is to file a complaint to the European Union Fundamental Rights commission in hopes that they can help me. An appeal to the European Union sounds futile to me, as everything you have said suggests that your rights under the E.U. Charter have not been violated. Call it robbery if you will from a moral perspective, but as you note, it is legalized robbery in much the same way that taxes are "legalized theft." Your efforts would be better sent hiring a lawyer to help you negotiate with the local government over the price. If you make a strong evidentiary case that the land is worth more than you have been offered, you have a decent chance of getting more than you have been offered, even if it is less than what you believe it is worth. You also have a better case of winning on appeal on the issue of an unfair price in a second instance court in Finland, than you would on the issue of whether the condemnation was legal, on which the settled law in Finland and under international law is that it generally is legal in your circumstances.
They can't simply keep the money; that's against the law. But in a situation like this, it's easy to get lost in the bureaucracy. The company may be in violation of different laws, re: For Your Information | United States Department of Labor, so you can try pointing this out in another email or letter. The threat of the Feds or other enforcement agency looking into the matter may make something happen. Or, try this: find the CEO (or a similarly high-ranked executive) on LinkedIn; many have open messaging in interest of good PR. Message/email them and carefully (and nicely) explain the situation. (A CEO will likely have an assistant monitoring their LinkedIn account. But, there are many stories of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos personally responding to emails.) Someone will make it happen and the employees who have not been helpful will be in hot water.
Non-Profits Need Not Have Owners But Must Have A Lawful Purpose Any non-profit company, for example, a 501(c)(3), is ownerless and can be run by a self-perpetuating board if desired, rather than having delegates that provide an outside source for new board members. In that case you have to set forth a purpose of the company or trust, to which its assets and profits must be used, and it must be managed in accordance with that purpose. You can also have a "private foundation" that is effectively ownerless, again with a designated charitable purpose. Generally speaking, the law limits how much compensation can be paid to officers and employees of such a company and restricts self-dealing transactions by such a company. You probably cannot create a valid trust or business with no beneficiaries and no designated charitable purpose which is supposed to merely accumulate its profits and assets. Ownerless Cooperatives Are An Oxymoron Your reference in this and other posts to an "ownerless cooperative" is basically an oxymoron. A cooperative is an entity owned by a class of people who have a contractual relationship with the entity (usually consumers or producers) who are the owners of the company with voting control and who are entitled to an adjustment of their transaction prices with the cooperative via a rebate or surplus check proportionate to the dollar volume of their dealings with the cooperative (Northwest Mutual, must rural electric companies, and most credit unions would be examples of consumer cooperatives, Ocean Spray is a good example of a producers cooperative). An ownerless entity is pretty much by definition not a cooperative. An excellent overview of forms of entity organization other than investor owned stock corporations can be found in The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann. The Life Of The Law Is Not Math Or Logic Honestly, it sounds like, in your several posts on the subject, that you are attempting the hide the ball of an ulterior purposes which is material to the legality and organization of an entity. The law is not like science or mathematics. You can't prove a bunch of isolated propositions and then string them together logically. The law operates on an entire comprehensive "fact pattern" and even if every step of your chain of reasoning to an ultimately result is supported by legal authority, this does not mean that this will be the result you get when you put all of the pieces together. That kind of logical reasoning doesn't work in a legal context. The heading of this section is a paraphrase of a famous statement about the law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. from "The Common Law" (1881) at page 1. Blockchains Are Not The Legal Innovation That They Claim To Be Using blockchain technology to manage "tokens" of voting control in an entity is ultimately completely irrelevant. Blockchain technology is just another alternative to certificated shares, shares kept on an ownership ledger, or shares kept through secondary shareholding intermediaries or brokers. The technology used to keep track of voting control or economic ownership is irrelevant, and some common entities (e.g. homeowner's associations) have ownership that is basically determined via a crude public blockchain called the county clerk and recorder's records. People who think that blockchains provide any significant legal innovation into anything (e.g. here) are fundamentally misguided and typically are not people familiar with the law who have misconceptions about how the law works. Also, contrary to the hype, blockchains are not fraud-proof and indeed, involve serious systemic risks of instability because an error in an old transaction can disrupt lots of current claims. Claims such as those made here that blockchain transactions are irrefutable are naive and basically false. A block chain is a bit like a real property record system without an adverse possession rule to make ancient glitches irrelevant. Moreover, blockchains are a solution to a non-problem. Authenticating ownership and voting rights, economic entitlements, and corporate actions is something that has never posed a very significant economic problem ever since writing was invented. These are economic problems that were already effectively solved in the days of the Minoans, and widespread ownership of well authenticated entities by numerous ever shifting groups of owners was a problem well in hand by the days of the British East India Company. Anonymous Ownership Or Contribution Records Are Illegal Truly anonymous ownership, however, is legally prohibited, even though ownership need not be made a matter of public record. In the case of for profit entities, by securities regulation which requires disclosure for purposes of exercising voting rights and for disclosing large blocks of ownership as required by law, and for purposes of tax law. In the case of non-profit entities, it is prohibited by virtue of laws regulating private foundations that impose tax requirements when certain concentrations of contributions come from a small, related group of people. In the case of political organizations, campaign finance laws require disclosure.
This happened recently in Washington state, when the state Supreme Court ordered the state government to comply with a constitutional funding mandate (McCleary v. Washington, 2012). The state did not comply for 6 years and was fined ($100,000 per day) for 3 years. I don't recall that the state paid a penny, and the courts did not demand payment of fines for that period. Public opinion did not have any obvious effect, but you could take this to Politics SE to get a lot of opinions as to whether public opinion mattered. The federal government can't get involved, unless they (the federal government) first make a federal issue out of it, perhaps because of some law suit. Power of enforcement is essential non-existent, given a sufficiently non-cooperative state government. I should point out that the court's order was a bit vague, that is, it was not &quot;release Smith from custody instantly&quot;, it required the government to act to the satisfaction of the court.