Company laws

Essay by joanne_zhou81University, Bachelor'sA-, March 2006

download word file, 15 pages 4.6

Part C

Question 1

1. Malcolm asks for legal advice.

There are many issues that Malcolm needs to look at due to his conduct as a director of Comtech. Directors of public companies have many statutory and general law duties that they need to be aware of. With statute law, the duties of directors are very specific and they are required to act with reasonable care and diligence. They are required to act in good faith, in the best interests of the company and their actions need to be for a proper purpose. They also have a duty not to continue trading if winding up. With the general law duties, directors have a financial duty as to act in the best interests of other members and Malcolm owes both these general law and statutory duties to company and members.

The investigation by ASIC revealed a numbers of breaches by Malcolm of his company duties.

He also did not attend meetings with the ASIC to discuss the documents and have a chance to clear his name and lessen the penalties. Malcolm has been very careless and will probably be charged with many things. He may be charged with criminal offences under criminal law but may evade prosecution under civil law where it must be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that he had purposefully breached his duties as director. There looks like there will be a case for a criminal law charges though if it can be shown that Malcolm was doing business when the company was insolvent. Criminal charges can occur if the company was insolvent when it went into debt or became insolvent by incurring the debt, and the director known that the company was insolvent or would become insolvent as a result of incurring the debt.

But this would...