Shareholders Liability to Tort Creditors Due To Pollution or Wastes of Company's In Ethiopia

Mulugeta, Tsegaw

BDU IR Home
→
School of Law
→
Law
→
Thesis and Dissertations
→
View Item

dc.contributor.author	Mulugeta, Tsegaw
dc.date.accessioned	2017-10-18T09:23:46Z
dc.date.available	2017-10-18T09:23:46Z
dc.date.issued	2017-10-18
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/8039
dc.description.abstract	One of the major attractions of the corporate form is limited liability, which permits those who invest in an incorporated business to limit potential losses. Limited liability allows for ‘risk sharing’ between the owners of the company and the outside parties with whom the company interacts. If the company fails, the effect of the doctrine is that losses are partly externalized – they fall upon external creditors. Although this is generally seen as acceptable in the ordinary course of commerce, where incorporated businesses benefit from reciprocal risk transfers, it proves to be far less palatable where the costs of business failure fall upon tort claimants. Unlike contractual creditors, tort claimants are unlikely to have opportunities to deal with the company that injures them. They require special protection by the law. However, the problem facing tort claimants has been the preference of the law to uphold limited liability at the expense of both ordinary tort doctrines and the principle of full compensation for wrongs. Recent scholarship has sought to re-examine current rules of risk-sharing between the owners of incorporated businesses and outside parties, including the rule of shareholder limited liability. Thus, scholars have noted the changed role of shareholders within the corporation. Shareholders can no longer always be assumed to be passive investors. Indeed, they might prove pivotal in business decision-making. This has led to a number of doctrines to make shareholders liable to company’s tort creditors. Scholars have noted, further, the injustice that accompanies the judgment-proofing of companies when this means denying full compensation to tort claimants injured by corporate wrongdoing. This thesis is, therefore, aimed at, having the above facts in mind, analyzing the situations of Ethiopia. That is, to critically enquire whether there exist grounds that give rise to the liability of shareholders for the torts committed by their companies in which they invest; whether the existence of the above problem(s) are backed up or regulated by the law; and finally what the different doctrines proposed at the international level says in relation to it. Key Words: Company/Corporation, Shareholders, Liability, Tort Creditors, International Doctrines, Grounds, Domestic Laws, Ethiopia.	en_US
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.subject	law	en_US
dc.title	Shareholders Liability to Tort Creditors Due To Pollution or Wastes of Company's In Ethiopia	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US