The possibility to bankrupt a company without losing more than you put into the venture is in my eyes a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
There probably needs to be some exceptional way in law to pierce the shell of limited liability and go after officers, perhaps even claw back from investors and shareholders.
(In practice, however, managers are only rarely put in jail, both because it's notoriously difficult to prove white-collar crime (except in few cases, like insider trading, which are the pursued with extra vigor), and because CEOs are generally rich and well connected... but the problem there is corruption, not some inherent feature/bug of the idea of limited liability company.)
We take money earned from theft and drug dealing, we take the stolen car from the person who innocently bought it. There's an offence of receiving stolen property. We don't take the millions from the execs who made millions pushing pharmaceuticals illegally, or the nuclear plant CEO and shareholder that has now, by dint of closure, given the job of decommissioning to the state - i.e. all of us. Once in a blue moon there's a criminal prosecution, but they just about always manage to stay wealthy.
We need to rethink the limits of limited liability as it's become a convenient shield to hide all sorts of unethical, shitty and outright illegal behaviour behind.
> Limited liability only protects the capital of the shareholders,
No, it also protects shareholders from crimes the PtLd commits in order to "serve them". This is a main problem with PtLds imho.
1) the fine needs to be fair to the society (often we see these "slap on the wrist" fines for big corps, that's just disgusting and shows how much our democracies are disfunctional)
2) i suggest this because i want the shareholders to be pushing their companies to ethical behavior.
3) it is very important that companies are also held liable for unethical behavior in other countries, and/or even for unethical behavior of subsidiaries (the foxcons and the likes).
4) When the fine is larger than the company's worth, collect it from the shareholders.
