Piercing the Corporate Veil in UK Law

Leading Cases
  • RE D
    • Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court)
    • 20 Noviembre 2006

    The object of the Act is to enable proceeds of crime to be ascertained, protected and realised. The first question therefore is whether there are corporate assets which should be treated as the defendant's assets and the second question is whether, if that is the case, a restraint and receivership order of the extent sought is necessary.

  • Prest v Petrodel Resources Ltd
    • Supreme Court
    • 12 Junio 2013

    In my view, the principle that the court may be justified in piercing the corporate veil if a company's separate legal personality is being abused for the purpose of some relevant wrongdoing is well established in the authorities. This is because I think that the recognition of a limited power to pierce the corporate veil in carefully defined circumstances is necessary if the law is not to be disarmed in the face of abuse.

    It is that the court may disregard the corporate veil if there is a legal right against the person in control of it which exists independently of the company's involvement, and a company is interposed so that the separate legal personality of the company will defeat the right or frustrate its enforcement.

    The correct analysis of the situation was that the court refused to be deterred by the legal personality of the company from finding the true facts about its legal relationship with Mr Dalby. It held that the nature of their dealings gave rise to ordinary equitable claims against both. The result would have been exactly the same if Burnstead, instead of being a company, had been a natural person, say Mr Dalby's uncle, about whose separate existence there could be no doubt.

    I conclude that there is a limited principle of English law which applies when a person is under an existing legal obligation or liability or subject to an existing legal restriction which he deliberately evades or whose enforcement he deliberately frustrates by interposing a company under his control.

  • Adams v Cape Industries Plc
    • Court of Appeal (Civil Division)
    • 27 Julio 1989

    Our law, for better or worse, recognises the creation of subsidiary companies, which though in one sense the creatures of their parent companies, will nevertheless under the general law fall to be treated as separate legal entities with all the rights and liabilities which would normally attach to separate legal entities.

  • Jennings v Crown Prosecution Service
    • House of Lords
    • 14 Mayo 2008

    The rationale of the confiscation regime is that the defendant is deprived of what he has gained or its equivalent. He cannot, and should not, be deprived of what he has never obtained or its equivalent, because that is a fine. This must ordinarily mean that he has obtained property so as to own it, whether alone or jointly, which will ordinarily connote a power of disposition or control, as where a person directs a payment or conveyance of property to someone else.

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Legislation
  • Manchester Good Government and Police Act 1844
    • UK Non-devolved
    • 1 de Enero de 1844
    ... ... any &\vel-, Pipe, or Drain, or into any \Veil, Streani, or Watercourse, Pound or Reservoir fbr ... every Person who shall bore, Piercing pierce, break, ciit open, or otherwise injure any ... - ferred to aiicl vested in the Uotly Corporate of tlie Borough. CCLXXI. And be it enacted, That ... ...
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Books & Journal Articles
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