Shareholder Agreements Mitigate the Majority vs Minority of Agency Problems

514 Words2 Pages

Shareholder’s agreements are contractual documents that work as a complement to the constituent documents and that are usually kept secret. They include clauses which intend to level the rights between majority and minority shareholders, so that no single block (majority shareholders) can adopt decisions that would bind or undermine the other block (minority shareholders). These clauses are the rearrangement of voting rights, appointment rights or exit rights, for example. Shareholder agreements allow for the rearranging of voting rights so that in the case of a corporate decision to make fundamental changes such as in the structure, the bylaws or to merge the company, the power is fairly distributed. These types of charter amendment decisions are usually adopted by supermajority voting of shareholders in order to protect minority shareholders from being excluded –their decision power is comparatively smaller than the majority shareholders. If there wasn’t a clause requiring supermajority for special resolutions in the shareholder’s agreement, a director appointed by the minority sh...

More about Shareholder Agreements Mitigate the Majority vs Minority of Agency Problems

Open Document