Set Of Shareholders Research Articles

How to Share Secret Efficiently over Networks

In a secret-sharing scheme, the secret is shared among a set of shareholders, and it can be reconstructed if a quorum of these shareholders work together by releasing their secret shares. However, in many applications, it is undesirable for nonshareholders to learn the secret. In these cases, pairwise secure channels are needed among shareholders to exchange the shares. In other words, a shared key needs to be established between every pair of shareholders. But employing an additional key establishment protocol may make the secret-sharing schemes significantly more complicated. To solve this problem, we introduce a new type of secret-sharing, calledprotected secret-sharing(PSS), in which the shares possessed by shareholders not only can be used to reconstruct the original secret but also can be used to establish the shared keys between every pair of shareholders. Therefore, in the secret reconstruction phase, the recovered secret is only available to shareholders but not to nonshareholders. In this paper, an information theoretically secure PSS scheme is proposed, its security properties are analyzed, and its computational complexity is evaluated. Moreover, our proposed PSS scheme also can be applied to threshold cryptosystems to prevent nonshareholders from learning the output of the protocols.

Realizing secret sharing with general access structure

Secret sharing (SS) is one of the most important cryptographic primitives used for data outsourcing. The (t, n) SS was introduced by Shamir and Blakley separately in 1979. The secret sharing policy of the (t, n) threshold SS is far too simple for many applications because it assumes that every shareholder has equal privilege to the secret or every shareholder is equally trusted. Ito et al. introduced the concept of a general secret sharing scheme (GSS). In a GSS, a secret is divided among a set of shareholders in such a way that any “qualified” subset of shareholders can access the secret, but any “unqualified” subset of shareholders cannot access the secret. The secret access structure of GSS is far more flexible than threshold SS. In this paper, we propose an optimized implementation of GSS. Our proposed scheme first uses Boolean logic to derive two important subsets, one is called Min which is the minimal positive access subset and the other is called Max which is the maximal negative access subset, of a given general secret sharing structure. Then, conditions of parameters of a GSS are established based on these two important subsets. Furthermore, integer linear/non-linear programming is used to optimize the size of shares of a GSS. The complexity of linear/non-linear programming is O(n), where n is the number of shares generated by the dealer. This proposed design can be applied to implement GSS based on any classical SS. However, our proposed method is limited to be applicable to some general secret sharing policies. We use two GSSs, one is based on Shamir's weighted SS (WSS) using linear polynomial and the other is based on Asmuth-Bloom's SS using Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT), to demonstrate our design. In comparing with existing GSSs, our proposed scheme is more efficient and can be applied to all classical SSs.

Related Party Transactions Under the Companies Act, 2013

The law governing RPTs is the Companies Act, 2013. The Companies Act, 2013 was unprecedented, in regard to the power granted to minority shareholders to reject RPT’s as the Ministry of Corporate affairs (hereinafter MCA) had come up with stringent rules which provided for several rounds of approval and disclosures of a wide range of transactions that companies entered into with relatives of promoters, entities controlled by promoters and entities controlled by relatives of promoters. Section 188 of the Act in its original form had mandated companies with paid-up capital greater than one crore rupees to seek approval of its board of directors by a special majority, irrespective of the share capital of the company or the value of a RPT. Section 188 of the Act to ensure independence in the manner of voting of RPTs had further barred all related parties from voting on RPTs. SEBI had also furthered the process of enhancing shareholder participation by mandating listed companies to provide ‘E-voting’ facilities to its shareholders in respect of business matters transacted by listed companies through the postal ballot procedure. The provision of E-voting facilities is likely to promote greater shareholder participation in matters concerning corporate governance. However, representations from the companies advocated that such stringent regulations hampered the efficiency in regard to business operations, the MCA through two circulars substantially diluted the provisions of the Companies Act, 2013 .The First Circular narrowed the definition of a ‘Related party’ for the purposed of voting on resolutions, where the circular clarified that a shareholder under the second proviso to section 188(1) would be considered a related party only with reference to a contract or arrangement for which the special resolution was being passed. The provisions of the aforementioned circular enabled a large set of shareholders who are likely to benefit but are not ‘related’ under the Companies to vote on RPT resolutions.The second circular from the MCA removed the classification of companies on the basis of Paid-up Capital, where companies are now required to seek shareholder approval for only those RPT’s which cross the transaction threshold of hundred crore rupees. The Circular also exempted companies from seeking shareholder approvals for RPT’s with wholly subsidiaries which increased the scope for potential abuse at the cost of minority investors. Additionally, the Companies Amendment act, 2015 passed by the Indian parliament envisages that RPT’S would only need shareholder approval through an ‘ordinary resolution’ and not a ‘Special resolution’ of disinterested shareholders (Majority of minority) further reducing the power of minority shareholders to block abusive RPT’s owing to a lower threshold of shareholder approval. Furthermore, amendments to Section 188 of the Companies Act, 2014 in regard to RPT’s have not been aligned with clause 49 of the listing agreement with SEBI which could create inconsistencies in the application of the legal principles to governs RPTs. The recent decision of the Bombay High Court which questioned the validity of ‘E- Voting’ has raised several legal uncertainties in regard to the procedure for approval of RPT’s.

Informed Trading and False Signaling with Open Market Repurchases

Public companies in the United States and elsewhere increasingly use open market stock buybacks, rather than dividends, to distribute cash to shareholders. Academic commentators have emphasized the possible benefits of such repurchases for shareholders. However, little attention has been paid to their potential drawbacks. This Article explains that managers currently are able to use open market repurchases and misleading repurchase announcements to enrich themselves at public shareholders’ expense. Managers, aware their stock is underpriced, frequently use repurchases to indirectly buy stock for themselves at a bargain price. Managers have also been able to boost stock prices by announcing repurchase programs they did not intend to execute, perhaps to unload their own shares at a high price. Such bargain repurchases and inflated-price sales systematically transfer significant amounts of value from one set of shareholders (public investors) to another (managers). Low-price buybacks are also likely to reduce aggregate shareholder value by distorting managers’ payout and investment decisions, further reducing public shareholder returns. The Article concludes by proposing a new approach to regulating open market repurchases: requiring managers to disclose specific details of the firm’s buy orders in advance. This pre-repurchase disclosure rule would undermine managers’ ability to use repur- chases for informed trading and false signaling, thereby reducing the resulting distortions and costs to shareholders. Moreover, it would achieve these objectives without eroding any of the potential benefits of repurchases. Previously circulated under the title “Share Repurchases and Managerial Opportunism”.

Business, Government, and the Privatisation of the Ashanti Goldfields Company in Ghana

The privatisation of Ashanti Goldfields Company (AGC) was an important part of Ghana’s neo-liberal reforms. Privatisation is explicitly intended to alter the balance of power between the public and private sector, and the process revealed much about the relationship between the state and the country’s business community. A close examination of the process confirms widely-held perceptions of the Rawlings government and its reform process as highly state-driven and subject to the personal idiosyncrasies of the country’s president. By contrast, Kufuor’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) demonstrated a less equivocal commitment to boosting the role of the private sector in the economy and employed a more routinely institutionalised set of interactions. While the outcome of these processes was sometimes counterintuitive, overall the privatization of AGC is likely to have shifted power out of the hands of the state and into the hands of an international set of shareholders.

Bounds and Techniques for Efficient Redistribution of Secret Shares to New Access Structures

We consider the problem of redistributing shares in a secret sharing scheme in such a way that shareholders of a scheme with one access structure can transfer information to a new set of shareholders, resulting in a sharing of the old secret among a new access structure. We describe a number of different scenarios and applications within which such a redistribution might be required, give some techniques for conducting a redistribution, and discuss the optimisation of the efficiency of such a process.

Optimal Dividend Policies and Corporate Growth

Summary In this paper we discuss the problem of determining an optimal dividend policy for a company having a set of shareholders with specified preferences. The yield opportunities on the capital invested in the company are stylized in that we assume that the company can only invest in two capital assets: one with a stochastic rate of return and one with a secure rate of return. We then discuss how the optimal dividend policy depends on the secure rate of return and on the riskiness of the random rate of return. Finally, the horizon effects on the optimal policies are discussed. In this paper we shall study the problem of determining an optimal dividend policy for a company with a random rate of return on investments and having a set of shareholders with specified preferences. By a dividend policy we shall understand a rule which completely determines the payments to be made to the holders of the company's common stock at any point in time. An optimal policy will consequently mean a dividend payment rule which maximizes some utility criterion as defined by the shareholders' preferences. The crux of the dividend problem is obviously how to represent the shareholders' preferences by a collective utility function representing the constituent individual preferences in a consistent manner. However, we shall circumvent the problems involved in collective choice and group decision-making by assuming that the shareholders' individual utility functions are identical. This assumption may not be so strong as it looks like at a first glance, as the shareholders who do not agree with the company's policy, can sell their shares and buy shares in other companies pursuing a policy that corresponds better to their individual preferences.