| Abstract [eng] |
The aim of the paper „Protection and defence problem analysis of minority shareholders rights in Lithuania“ is to define the minority shareholders themselves, to discribe the rights prescribed to them. The main issue is to analyse the aspects of abuse of their rights and methods of struggling against this illegal behavior. Lithuanian law does not establish special mechanism for the protection of minority shareholders. However, it does invest all shareholders with the certain legal aids which serve as tools to protect their interests. These include those rights which are primarily based on the principles of equality and proportionality; as well as other rights, such as attendance and voting at the general meeting of shareholders, contesting the decisions made by the company‘s bodies, and the right to access to information about the company. Minority shareholders are entitled to freely exercise any of above rights. Moreover they are entitled to require the investigation of the company‘s activities and thus judicially verify whether the company, its corporate bodies, or any of its members are acting with due diligence and resonable care. They also have a right to force majority share holders to buy their holdings to use so called squeeze-out and sellout rights and derivative action procedure. All these features were listed in the paper. Due to Paper is called „Protection and defence problem analysis of minority shareholders rights in Lithuania“, there were analysed main difficulties met by this group of shareholders - right to information limitation by proclaiming the information to constitute the company‘s business secrets; the right to participate at the general meeting of shareholders may be circumventation by failing to provide the minority shareholder with the detailed agenda; the right to receive dividends rejection if the majority sharerholders decide to reinvest them instead of declaring the dividends. |
