On The Company's Shareholders The Right To Know

The right to know of shareholders is a compound right. Generally, according to different countries' legislation, the right to know of shareholders has the following four efficacies, that is, shareholders' inspection right to company's relevant documents, inquiry right to company's management, outside inspector-appointing right and relevant litigation right. Actually, shareholders' right to know is take as a utilitarian right and a minority shareholders' right, which concurrently possesses self-sufficiency and common-sufficiency.The basic reason of how it is come about is the result of the separation of company's ownership and management. Under premise of the above separation, the daily operation and decision rights are owned by the Board of Directors and the top management of company, which is good for enhancing proficiency of operation and improvement of decisional efficiency, but it will also cause the superiority of the Board of Directors, and lead to the weakness position for shareholders to know company's operational information. In order to protect the legitimate right of shareholders, especially holders with a small sum of shares, the shareholders' right to know come into being.Shareholders' right to know and company's management rights are conflictive. For one thing, in order to guard their self-interest, the management staff tries to exclude holders from knowing the company's information instinctively. And the other is that shareholders will exert the right to know and sometimes they will go too far to abusing this right in order to exercise their voting right, enhance supervision to management and take precautions against moral crisis of managers. The nature of shareholders' right to know system is to balance the interest between shareholders and management, and thus push to health development of corporation system.The 2005 Company Law (Revised) does have some provisions about the right to know of shareholders, which mainly provided in the inspection right and the litigation right if any violations occur. Nevertheless, the right to know of shareholders prescribed in Company Law of PRC is too simple to be systematic, which lead to impracticability. Through learning successful legislative experiences from countries around the world, this thesis puts foreword some suggestion about system of the right to know of shareholders.At last, there comes the conclusion of this thesis. From micro angle, the purpose of this system is to protect the right of shareholder and weaken the information superiority of company's management staff; and from macro and long-term angle, the purpose is to balance interest between shareholders, company itself and management, thus protecting effectively healthy development of the company and playing the role of company in the economic development. It is a dynamic balance, and we should establish the system of right to know of shareholders and improve it according to the development and change of economy and society.