Officers and Members of Company in UK Law

It does, as equity always does, enable the court to subject the exercise of legal rights to equitable considerations; considerations, that is, of a personal character arising between one individual and another, which may make it unjust, or inequitable, to insist on legal rights, or to exercise them in a particular way.

A living person has a mind which can have knowledge or intention or be negligent and he has hands to carry out his intentions. A corporation has none of these: it must act through living persons, though not always one or the same person. He is acting as the company and his mind which directs his acts is the mind of the company. He is not acting as a servant, representative, agent or delegate. If it is a guilty mind then that guilt is the guilt of the company.

Normally the Board of Directors, the Managing Director and perhaps other superior officers of a company carry out the functions of management and speak and act as the company. But the Board of Directors may delegate some part of their functions of management giving to their delegate full discretion to act independently of instructions from them.

What emerges is that, in addition to the foreseeability of damage, necessary ingredients in any situation giving rise to a duty of care are that there should exist between the party owing the duty and the party to whom it is owed a relationship characterised by the law as one of "proximity" or "neighbourhood" and that the situation should be one in which the court considers it fair, just and reasonable that the law should impose a duty of a given scope upon the one party for the benefit of the other.

In my judgment, much of the confusion that has crept into the law flows from the use of the phrase "ultra vires" in different senses in different contexts. The reconciliation of the authorities can only be achieved if one first defines the sense in which one is using the words "ultra vires". For reasons which will appear, in my judgment, the use of the phrase "ultra vires" should be restricted to those cases where the transaction is beyond the capacity of the company and therefore wholly void.

Though not essential to my reasoning, I also consider that the principle established in In re Hampshire Land Company, Belmont Finance and Attorney General's Reference (No 2 of 1982) points towards the same result It prevents a company being treated as party to a fraud committed by its officers "on" or "against" the company, at least in the context of claims by the company for redress for offences committed against the company: Belmont Finance, 261D-H, per Buckley LJ, and 271F-G, per Goff LJ, and Attorney General's Reference (No 2 of 1982), p.640A-B, per Kerr LJ; and see Edwards Karwacki Smith & Co. Pty. Ltd. v Jacka Nominees Pty. Ltd. (1994) 15 ACSR 502, 515-517.