One of the most important issues in relation to a company being
accepted for listing purposes on international stock exchanges is
that of shareholder protection. Some stock exchanges take this far
more seriously than others. For example while BVI companies have
always been listed on stock exchanges in New York (both NYSE and
NASDAQ), London, Oslo, Singapore and Toronto until recently, a
listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was not a possibility for a
BVI company and one of the reasons given was that statutory
protection for minority shareholders of BVI companies was less
robust than it was felt necessary.
It is probably fair to say that in the past, one of the
shortcomings of BVI corporate statutes was that protection, of the
rights of minority shareholders required more emphasis. Apart from
protective provisions that the shareholders would (and often did)
put into the Memorandum and Articles of Association of the relevant
company and protection afforded at
