This article aims to address some of the more conceptual questions about companies sitting behind two recent cases. Lord Scott in the House of Lords described Stone & Rolls as difficult but the facts in Stone & Rolls and Safeway could hardly be simpler. Stone & Rolls involved a claim by a...

This chapter will consider and add to the research on corporate governance in New Zealand listed companies. There is little evidence of investigation over the past ten years of the issue of the levels of common ownership and control in large listed companies in New Zealand. We will use...

Between 2006 and 2010 approximately 32 finance companies went into receivership, liquidation or were bailed out by the Government in New Zealand. The total combined outstanding debt from these failures exceeds NZD$5.3 billion. Excessive, unregulated, and in some cases, undisclosed, related party...

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...

The Financial Crisis of 2008–09 raises questions about the assumptions that underpin corporate governance. Shareholder value and private ordering may not in fact be the best means of promoting efficiency and corporate responsibility, and the mechanisms that have been traditionally used to...

Mystery is at the core of corporate law. The first question in corporate law is also the last: what is a company? It is a question that the legal philosopher HLA Hart (1983, 23) would prefer we did not ask, but given the centrality of companies to modern life, we cannot help ourselves as long as...