Shareholders' Agreement as an Instrument of Regulation of Corporate Relations in a Joint-Stock Company

This graduate paper is aimed at analysis of the shareholder’s agreement as a way of regulating corporate relations in the joint-stock company. The main objectives of the paper are: (a) studying the regulation of corporate relations as a whole, including defining of the corporate relations, the purposes pursued in their regulation, as well as the instruments used for regulating such relations; (b) analysis of the concept of the shareholders’ agreement as well as definition of the range of sources of regulation of shareholder agreements; (c) analysis of the legal nature of the shareholder agreement; (d) the description of the shareholder agreement as a civil law contract, which includes an analysis of the individual elements of the agreement: the parties, the subject matter, often used conditions and methods of protection against breach of contract. Based on this research the following conclusions were made: firstly, corporate relations are a type of civil law relations; secondly, due to the specific nature of this type of relationship, it requires special regulation by the law; thirdly, the law provides for three types of instruments for regulating corporate relations: through legislation, through local regulations and through a shareholder agreement as a contractual way of regulating corporate relations; fourthly, the shareholder agreement is defined as an agreement on the exercise of rights certified by shares, and on the specifics of the exercise of rights to shares; fifthly, the nature of shareholder’s agreement can be defined as contractual one; sixthly, the opportunity to include provisions used on foreign shareholders’ agreements are rather limited in Russia.