Associate Professor Hanne Søndergaard Birkmose from the Department of Law at Aarhus University has received a grant of DKK 4.3 million from the so-called YDUN programme, awarded by the Danish Council for Independent Research to research projects with considerable international potential.  

She will use the money to fund her project on the tendency to impose more duties on shareholders, when they invest in listed companies in particular. There seems to be increasing pressure from researchers and politicians to regard shareholders not just as having certain rights but also as a group with certain obligations. In her project description, Hanne Søndergaard Birkmose describes this apparent shift in the perception of shareholders, which was reinforced during the financial crisis, as it was made clear that the current framework for the regulation of corporate governance has obvious defects.

Grant kicks off the research project
Hanne Søndergaard Birkmose is very happy to have received the grant, and with this money, her research can take on several dimensions:

“The plan is to assemble a group of European researchers, who will be set the task of analysing and determining which duties we can and should impose on the shareholders, the possible implications of doing so and how we may enforce the rules and penalise any infringement. With this money we can afford to organise a conference, do research abroad and publish a book on the shareholders’ duties,” she explains.

Read the press release (in Danish only): YDUN-bevillinger fra Det Frie Forskningsråd

Further information

Associate Professor Hanne Søndergaard Birkmose
Mail: hsb@law.au.dk
Tel.: +45 8716 4979