Law News
Don tasks Law Reform Commission on new laws

A UNIVERSITY don and first Nigerian Professor of Company Security law, Professor Joseph Efeyemineni Abugu has suggested that the Nigerian Law reform commission should have the direct responsibility of proposing law reform legislation to the legislative arm of government.

He also recommended that solicitor general/permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice be made a permanent member of the commission and vested with executive approvals to proposals for law reforms.

He also opined that for an effective corporate law reform regime, the enabling law which charges the Nigerian Law Rreform Commission with federal legislative law reform proposals needs to be amended to make the work and recommendations of the Commission more fruitful in ensuring legislation at the National Assembly.

Prof. Abugu spoke at the 2015 Inaugural lecture of the University of Lagos on the theme: The Monster Theory: Setting the boundaries of corporate financial malpractice.

He explained that there is a monster in the corporate form of doing business, which he partly attributed to legislators failure to give attention to detail and in default of attending to the causes of corporate failures.

According to him, other aspects of the challenge is attributable to the puppeteers who run corporate organizations – that is the directors and managers and, of course, our human nature to constitute ourselves ‘monsters’ to everything around us in the quest for dominion and maximisation of profit.

“A company traditionally pools capital from a large number of persons to do business, the object being to make profit and create wealth for owners of its capital. But corporate history is replete with frauds, corporate failures and scandals.

Corporate failure manifests in insolvency or bankruptcy, often with allegations of unethical behavior by people acting within or on behalf of a corporation.

Investors perpetually live with the risk of losing capital, thus making investment in companies a very tenuous step. To the investor who has suffered any of the adverse fates of the capital market, a company is indeed a monster”, he stated.

The lecture which was well attended by both distinguished academic and non-academic staff of the university, including the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Rahamon Ade Bello, who in his speech concluded that with the submission of Prof. Abugu, he has successful paid his academic debt to the University of Lagos with this excellent discussion and submission.

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