On The Shareholder Inspection Right Of Limited Liability Corporations

While the ownership and control is separated and the shareholders are gradually away from the management, as is caused by the information asymmetric, a hard problem of losing balance in the corporate governance has been confusing the minority shareholders. In limited liability corporations, this imbalance issue appears particularly serious that some major shareholders take the advantage of their position of executives to monopolize the business information of the corporation, to exclude the minority shareholders from management, and thereby the major shareholders may refer to abuse rights and even to harm the investment interest of the minority shareholders. The shareholders' right to know arises to address these issues, and as the key component within the right to know, shareholder inspection right has been playing the part of balancer in the corporate governance. This paper is based on the study of domestic and overseas legislative pattern and juridical practice. It defined the boundary of the nature of shareholder inspection right, analyses the theory and the significance of shareholder inspection right in corporate governance. We also provide further recommendations for the present status of domestic legislation.In the first part of this paper, we analyzed the shareholder inspection right from the significance in balance of corporate governance and the legal attribute as well as the legislative purpose. The second part is the main part of this paper. We started from the legislative purpose of shareholder inspection right, made deep analysis of the subjects, objects, procedure and restriction based on the study of domestic and overseas legislative pattern and juridical practice. In the last part, we made some recommendations to perfect the shareholder inspection right system, such as expand the limit of the objects, simplifying the judicial relief procedures and punish the company and managers for their malicious acts.