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Shareholders are the owners of a company, and as such, they are entitled to certain rights. Which explicit rights a shareholder has depends on the size of his equity stake and the jurisdiction in which the company is operating. Primary shareholder rights include the right to participate and vote at the company’s general shareholder meetings and the managing directors’ election. Shareholders have the right to obtain relevant and material information on the corporation on a timely and regular basis and are entitled to decide upon the distribution of a company’s profit (World Bank, 2022).
In most countries, at least some of the shareholder rights are codified not in law but in “Codes of Corporate Governance,” which work according to a “comply or explain” mechanism. While small shareholders usually have limited incentive to participate actively in supervising the management due to their small financial stake, institutional investors often play an active role in corporate...
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Ruhwedel, F. (2023). Shareholder Rights. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_490-1
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