Corporate Groups and Shadow Business Practices

This book explains why existing laws on group transparency fail to fully grasp some activities of corporate groups. This phenomenon, denoted 'shadow business', is a societal concern. This book provides the reader with examples and an interpretative solution to increase the law's effectiveness based on Systems Thinking.

The uniqueness of this book is its conceptualization of a corporate group as a system of interaction, comprised of nodes, links and internal governance tools. This framework can be used to understand what constitutes a group, based on affiliation-linkages. By increasing our perception of group-structuring we can assess the extent to which existing laws address all variables. If the law does not consider certain variables to be used for identifying groups, a case of shadow business may be identified. Group-transparency is a recurring topic on the regulatory agenda. In this book, three legal domains are analysed questioning whether specific amendments have led to increased group-transparency: the control-definition for consolidated accounts, shareholder-transparency in company law, and major holding disclosure in listed companies. This book identifies deficiencies of the law in obtaining its regulatory objective of group-transparency, and proposes an interpretative solution based on Systems Thinking.