New Zealand has the reputation as a pioneering nation in policy reform- it was the first to introduce a comprehensive no fault based system for accident compensation, it had an early form of the welfare state, it embraced the economic reforms of the 1980s, and it was the first country to allow...

Can shareholders of a company override a management decision made by the board? The answer, at least since Automatic Self-Cleansing v Cuninghame [1906] 2 Ch 34 (CA) in 1906 has been an unequivocal no. In fact, as implied by Cozens-Hardy LJ in Cuninghame, the answer has been no since the statutes...

New Zealand's image as clean and green and a fair society is core to its identity. Yet despite the rhetoric, sustainability considerations are not yet central to its corporate governance. Shareholder primacy thinking by some regulators, commentators and boards has hampered attempts to encourage...

The risk of company directors in New Zealand being found liable for corporate fault has expanded in recent years. An increasing number of statutory provisions provide for liability for directors. When the Companies Act 1993 was introduced, it was accompanied by howls of outrage from those who...

In this case study we address the issue of CEO succession drawing directly on the experience of the board of directors of Air New Zealand. Despite extensive literature on CEO-board relations, there has been a scarce number of studies on managing the processes of CEO succession and appointment...

The conventional shareholder-centric view of company law holds that directors manage the company for the benefit of shareholders of the company, and the shareholders have ultimate and residual control over the company. This article re-examines the source of the management powers of the board,...

With the memory of the finance company failures and several high profile cases involving corporate wrongdoing by directors still fresh, the question of whether New Zealand has done enough to prevent a repetition of these events in the future needs to be addressed. The current review of...