Transactions between a corporation and a “related party” (a director, the dominant shareholder, or an affiliate of theirs) are a common instrument for those in control to divert value from a corporation, especially in countries with concentrated ownership. While direct evidence of value diversion via related party transactions (RPTs) is obviously hard to obtain, widespread use of RPTs has been observed for example in China (in the form of inter-company loans) and South Korea (also as a tool to transfer wealth from one generation of controllers to the next in avoidance of inheritance taxes), has been vividly reported for post-privatization Russia and Italy (where corporate scandals, such as Parmalat and, more recently, Fondiaria-Sai, often go together with significant RPT activity). Anecdotal evidence of value extraction via RPTs also exists with regard to the US (think of the Hollinger case and those reported in Atanasov et al.’s paper on law and tunneling, available here). Their (ab)use at Russian and East-Asian companies listed in the UK has recently prompted the UK Listing Authority to stiffen its already strict provisions on RPTs (see here; for a news report on RPTs at one of these East-Asian companies—Bumi, now renamed Asia Mineral Resources—see here).
In my article Related Party Transactions: Policy Options and Real-world Challenges (with a Critique of the European Commission Proposal), published in 16 European Business Organization Law Review 1 (2015), and available here (and here as a working paper), I provide a comparative and functional overview of how laws deal with RPTs and criticize a recent European Commission proposal for a harmonized EU regime on RPTs (see Article 9c of the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directives 2007/36/EC and 2013/34/EU, available here).
