Welcome!

To all those reading this I am David Gibbs; I am a Lecturer in Law at the University of East Anglia.

I created this blog as a general out-let of ideas for my research, as well as keeping those interested up-to-date on my research and general interests.

I completed my PhD thesis at the University of East Anglia in 2014. The thesis was recommended for the award of PhD with no corrections. My external examiner was Prof. Simon Deakin (Cambridge) and internal examiner was Prof. Morten Hviid.
My PhD research centred on directors' duties and company law. The thesis was titled 'Non-Executive Self-Interest: Fiduciary Duties and Corporate Governance'. It was a doctrinal and empirical study on whether self-interest was suitably controlled amongst non-executive directors.

My supervisors were Prof. Mathias Siems, Prof. Duncan Sheehan, Dr. Sara Connolly and Dr. Rob Heywood

All opinions of any existing or future blogpost are my own. They do not necessarily represent the views of any of my associated institutions.
ORCID 0000-0002-6596-8536



Tuesday 16 October 2012

Updates and Developments in Regulatory Competition







Having not blogged in a few weeks I thought I should post something.

Teaching has started down at Hertfordshire and as expected every minute is being filled with meetings and class preparation. I am currently teaching on the LL.B in Company, Commercial and International Commercial alongside the LL.M in Company. For Company Law I have been made module organiser, albeit after the module guide went out to students so including areas such as regulatory competition are very much on an ad hoc basis at the moment.

In regards to regulatory competition a new case has emerged from the ECJ (Vale Costruzioni) over the last couple of months that effectively allowed a transfer of seat without restrictions using national transformation laws as a cross-border conversion. See here for overview before the case was decided. The decision can be seen here. Although I do not know too much of the exact details it seems the court has allowed an Italian company to use the Hungarian Transformation Act to transform itself in to a Hungarian company. It is quite a surprise that the ECJ reached this conclusion despite my own recent observations that the ECJ would be unlikely to depart easily from its stance on restricting movement due to shareholder and creditor protection and its own ability to establish rules on cross border transfers. However, having spoken recently to a professor and judge in Germany recently, Prof Ries, who is visiting currently at the University of Hertfordshire, he informs me that he has not heard of any instances of companies taking advantage of this new ruling. By any means it is certainly an interesting development.

As to the thesis.... The thesis is almost complete! Just an introduction and conclusion to brush up then the full draft has to be dealt with by my supervisors. With any luck it will all be done and dusted by February next year.