‘Front’ or ‘Straw Men’ Directors: A Missing Element in the Effort to Prevent the Abuse of Companies?

Front or straw men directors are often used to conceal who is really managing companies involved in illicit activities of different kinds. Whereas the EU in recent years has made much headway in the effort to curb the abuse of companies, the EU has done little to address this problem. It is pointed out that such front or straw men directors are in fact a problem and that they can – and has been in several Member States – be addressed in different ways. The article analyses these different approaches and points out their pros and cons.

The Elephant in the Room and Straw Men on Fire

A great unacknowledged challenge in litigating systemic discrimination claims under the section 15 equality guarantee of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms1 is that claimants bear a double burden. Like all litigants, they must meet the burden of proving the elements of their legal claim. But, before they can do that, equality claimants must often first meet the extraordinary burden of dislodging judges’ phenomenological anchoring in worldviews shaped by privilege. Where judges lack lived experience of systemic oppression, claimants must convince them that oppression exists. This gulf between lived experiences — what I call the reality gap — is the elephant in the room in many section 15 cases. 1 s 15, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11.

From serpents and doves to the war on teleocracy

In one of his earliest papers, ‘Serpents and Doves in Classical International Theory’ (1988), Nick Rengger set out themes that would be important to him for the next thirty years, including a Rortyan/Oakeshottian commitment to conversation as the appropriate mode of human inquiry, with the premise that there is no truth to be discovered, and a healthy scepticism directed towards reformist projects in international relations. These themes are present in his final works on just war and the anti-Pelagian imagination, but in a new, and less attractive, more dogmatic form. His critique of ‘teleocracy’ had hardened into something that no longer resembled a conversation, and his critique of progressivism involved the burning of a multitude of straw men. In 1988 Rengger aspired to be one of Rorty’s ‘edifying’ philosophers, by 2018 he seemed to have become committed to a system.