Proponents of the global shareholder activism movement have recently praised the EU for generously empowering shareholders through the so-called Shareholder Rights Directive (“SRD”) (Directive 2007/36/EC). A year after the deadline for the transposition of the SRD into national corporate laws an article in the current issue of European Company Law entitled Is the EU Taking Shareholder Rights Seriously? An Essay on the Impotence of Shareholdership in Corporate Europe checks what progress has really been made regarding the issue of shareholder involvement in European corporate governance.

The article attempts to show that the deficit in the European corporate governance model with regard to the status of the shareholders persists even in the post-SRD era and that there is still a long distance to be covered in order to truly empower shareholders in the EU. The deficiencies of the past in shareholder governance have not been cured by the SRD, while the latter does not interact satisfactorily with the existing EU and national legal framework in order to unfetter shareholders from the mechanisms that restricted their active engagement.  European corporate law is still captive of an ideology that wants other corporate constituencies to be protagonists in corporate affairs.

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