Revisiting the Protection of Minority Shareholders: International Conference

The Department of Law at the University of Cyprus is hosting an international conference on company law, scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 15 October 2025. The title of the conference is ‘Revisiting the Protection of Minority Shareholders in Company Law: EU, Comparative and National Perspectives’. The protection of minority shareholders is a core subject of company law, but there is no recent international conference examining various EU, comparative and national perspectives on this area. This conference aims to review and assess various aspects of minority shareholder protection in company law, examine the influence of EU Law on it, place it within the internal market landscape, draw insights from influential jurisdictions, and proceed to thought-provoking comparisons between national company laws.

This is an open event, as there is no conference fee. Anyone interested in this topic is welcome. The conference programme is available here .

This conference is funded by the Leventis Foundation and is hosted by the University of Cyprus as part of the Research Project ‘Protection of Minority Shareholders in Cyprus Company Law and Capital Markets Law: an EU and Comparative Analysis’ (ProMiSh). The Principal Investigator of this Research Project and the coordinator of this conference is Thomas Papadopoulos, Associate Professor of Business Law at the University of Cyprus. Dr Georgios Zouridakis, PhD (Essex), is the Research Fellow of this Research Project.

This conference seeks to bring together experts who will examine the protection of minority shareholders in order to generate valuable insights about its fundamental mechanisms, to propose solutions to various problems and to reveal new challenges for EU, comparative and national company law and perspectives on reform. 

The keynote speaker will be Professor Mathias Siems, Professor of Private Law and Market Regulation at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

This conference will be divided into three parts. The first part will scrutinize shareholder activism and the effective exercise of minority shareholder rights. More specifically, it will review the state of the art of (minority) shareholder activism in Europe, the options availed by each jurisdiction and the EU influence. 

The second part of this conference will investigate protection of minority shareholders through transparency and information. To that end, speakers will deal with information and inspection rights, related party transactions, rules on disclosure and their interplay with the broader national company and capital markets law framework.

Finally, the third part of this conference will be dedicated to the protection of minority shareholders in the context of fundamental changes and control mechanisms. Delistings, cross-border transformations, multiple-vote share structures and takeovers, all pose significant dangers for minority shareholders.

Overall, this conference aims at providing an in-depth and critical understanding of minority shareholder protection at EU level, availing insightful views from selected jurisdictions in order to scrutinize national law choices and initiatives in the light of EU harmonization. With this approach, this international conference will fill an important gap in the research of company law. It will bring together the national experiences in the context of EU and comparative law, from the purview of shareholder protection and will provide a deeper understanding of the network of rights and remedies comprising the respective legal framework. It is expected that the papers to be presented and the discussion to follow will identify existing gaps and problems and will demonstrate the prospects for reform at both the national and EU levels.

Thomas Papadopoulos is an Associate Professor of Business Law at the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus.