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Piercing the corporate veil or lifting the corporate veil is a legal decision to treat the rights or duties of a corporation as the rights or liabilities of its shareholders. Usually a corporation is treated as a separate legal person , which is solely responsible for the debts it incurs and the sole beneficiary of the credit it is owed.
It has often been supposed to cast a veil over the personality of a limited company through which the courts cannot see. But that is not true. The courts can and often do draw aside the veil. They can, and often do, pull off the mask. They look to see what really lies behind. The legislature has shown the way with group accounts and the rest.
Fraud, lifting the veil Gilford Motor Co Ltd v Horne [1933] Ch 935 is a UK company law case concerning lifting the corporate veil . It gives an example of when courts will treat shareholders and a company as one, in a situation where a company is used as an instrument of fraud.
Lifting the veil Jones v Lipman [1962] 1 WLR 832 is a UK company law case concerning piercing the corporate veil . It exemplifies the principal case in which the veil will be lifted, that is, when a company is used as a "mere facade" concealing the "true facts", which essentially means it is formed to avoid a pre-existing obligation.
In civil law jurisdictions, the juridical basis of the exceptions is generally the concept of abuse of rights, to which the International Court of Justice was referring in In re Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Co Ltd [14] when it derived from municipal law a limited principle permitting the piercing of the corporate veil in cases of misuse ...
To reach this conclusion the Court examined the requirements to "lift the veil". Wilson J. explained: The law on when a court may disregard this principle by "lifting the corporate veil" and regarding the company as a mere "agent" or a "puppet" of its controlling shareholder or a parent corporation follows no consistent principle.
The grounds for the decision were (1) that since D.H.N. was in a position to control its subsidiaries in every respect, it was proper to pierce the corporate veil and treat the group as a single economic entity for the purpose of awarding compensation for disturbance; (2) that if the companies were to be treated as separate entities, there was ...
Sir Andrew Morritt VC held that there was enough evidence to lift the veil on the basis that it was a "mere facade". He noted the tension between Adams v Cape Industries plc and later cases and stated that impropriety is not enough to pierce the veil, but the court is entitled to do so where a company is used ‘as a device or façade to conceal the true facts and the liability of the ...