Blog

In the last few years there had sprung up in New Zealand a series of first instance cases where judges had acceded to pleas by liquidators that the damages for which company directors could be found...

In practice, the same investment firms and credit institutions are acting as a custodian for discretionary mandates and ‘execution only’ services under MiFID II and CRD IV, a depositary under the...

The ability to avoid fraudulent or preferential transfers is a fundamental part of U.S. bankruptcy law. However, when a transfer by a U.S. entity to a non-U.S. transferee takes place outside the U.S...

The recent UK Parliamentary cross-party enquiry into the collapse of Carillion plc, the British multinational facilities management and construction services company makes interesting reading. Its...

From time to time I am asked to explain how I can support the disproportionate voting found in dual class shares while at the same time strongly criticizing the 'empty voting' of mutual fund advisors...

How to master the profusion of financial regulation, let alone comply with it, is one of the most pressing issues faced by the financial sector today. An important part of the answer is RegTech:...

Retail banking in the UK is undergoing profound changes partly as a result of regulatory interventions such as Open Banking, a remedy imposed by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) which came...

In Case C-284/16 Achmea (Achmea), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) seems to once and for all establish that the legal system of the European Union (EU law) precludes investor-state dispute...

In a recent paper, I try to understand the rationale behind the observed equilibrium when it comes to regulating football on the European continent. The intuition from sports economics is that sports...

The term ‘smart contract’ refers to computer code that is designed automatically to execute contractual duties upon the occurrence of a trigger event. Referring to a 1997 paper by Szabo, the simple...

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) was for a long time considered a voluntary matter, to be exercised by companies in the interests of stakeholders, it is increasingly acquiring legal status...

In a previous post, we wrote that the UK Government announced a series of reforms to the UK Corporate Governance regime in August 2017. Some of these reforms are being addressed through the on-going...

The European Commission has funded a project to study ‘semi-formal’ insolvency proceedings in four EU countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK) to collect the best empirical data available in...

The article ‘China’s “Corporatization Without Privatization” and the Late 19th Century Roots of a Stubborn Path Dependency’ analyzes the contemporary program of ‘corporatization without privatization...

Since 2008, the US Department of Justice has brought numerous criminal actions against major foreign banks for tax evasion, benchmark manipulation, money laundering, sanctions violations, and corrupt...

The gender gap in pay and promotions is an extensively documented labor market phenomenon. The financial and legal sectors are prominent examples (see here, here and here). The bottom line is that...

My article offers a normative behavioural finance analysis of the marketing communications regime in Europe’s new Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II). The article aims to bridge the...

Benjamin Franklin famously said, ‘in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’. However, when it comes to our digital deaths the old adage is far from true. On 18 June...