> As a lawyer, i can also tell you the professional duties you claim are either non-existent or not as absolute as you make them.
"under American law we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders to account for things properly, so if we were, for example, to just arbitrarily decide to pay a different tax rate than we were required to, a more favourable one for example to a particular country, how would we account for that?" - Eric Schmidt on why Google paid "£3.4m in tax on £3.2bn of sales" (.1%)
I'm really unsure what is this comment supposed to add to the discussion. It doesn't respond substantively to any point i made, it's not even relevant to the quote you are responding to, it's not caselaw or legal argumentation, it's a CEO giving a political answer to a question. Is that supposed to be shocking or something? I'm not even sure.
Truthfully, it makes it seem like you aren't even trying to have a real discussion, you just want to grind an axe.
[1] "While the duty to maximize shareholder value may be a useful shorthand for a corporate manager to think about how to act on a day to day basis, this is not legally required or enforceable ….
Under this legal regime, it is not malfeasance for boards or corporate chiefs to make decisions that do not maximize shareholder value."
[2] "Contrary to what many believe, U.S. corporate law does not impose any enforceable legal duty on corporate directors or executives of public corporations to maximize profits or share price" (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...)
[3] There are only two legal duties here. The duty of care and the duty of loyalty. As I said, neither is about maximization of profits, though you will occasionally find courts with loose language around the duty of loyalty. The duty of loyalty's history is about not making money at the corporations expense - you must put the corporation's interests above your own. Transforming that into a "you must maximize profit at all costs" is ... a pretty far step. Again, 99.99% court cases here, and traditional breach of this duty are about either taking a corporate opportunity for yourself or making self-interested transactions.
"A direct quote of Google's long time former CEO making the exact same argument I am seems pretty on topic to me."
It's only on topic because you keep changing topics!
You've now gone and pretty much ignored every point made and just shifted discussion to something else in pretty much every reply.
It's not even the same argument you have made in these replies, as you claim.
(Eric is talking about accountability to shareholders, you started by talking about direct benefit to the business. These are incredibly different things)
So while this has been fun, it doesn't seem very useful or constructive.
"under American law we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders to account for things properly, so if we were, for example, to just arbitrarily decide to pay a different tax rate than we were required to, a more favourable one for example to a particular country, how would we account for that?" - Eric Schmidt on why Google paid "£3.4m in tax on £3.2bn of sales" (.1%)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/27/google-er...