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Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 05:30:43 +0000
From: Road Alert!
To: roadalert@gn.apc.org
Subject: Harassing Corporations - another technique.

Hello...the following procedure is an interesting information gathering and company-harrassment technique. It's a way any member of the public should be able to get an appointment to shiff around the company head office of their choice! (For more on the Companys Act, consult "Basic Law for Road Protestors" - e-mail if you're interested.)

If loads of people did this to a single company (Costain? BAe? Tarmac? McDonalds? Where do you start?!), and followed it through, quite a lot of harrassment could be achieved.

Write those pompous letters now!

RA!
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The procedure is very simple: just write to the Company Secretary (at the company's head office) saying that you want to exercise your rights under the Companies Act 1985, section 356, to inspect the Register of Members (ie shareholders). If you want, you can say that unless he replies within 14 days, you will start a private prosecution, or you can keep it fluffy to start with and save the threats for later. I prefer the latter approach.

You can also ask to inspect the Registers of Directors, Secretaries and Charges, but there probably won't be much mileage in inspecting these. The names of Directors and Secretaries are available from Companies House, and there may not be a Register of Charges. Charges I think include things like mortgages and secured loans.

If you have a share in the company, you can also inspect the Minute Books (minutes of AGMs etc) - but you must be a shareholder.

If you want to extract maximum harassment, you can insist that you are allowed to inspect the original registers, and not copies.

You should also be allowed a reasonable time to inspect and make copies of the documents, so if you had nothing better to do, you could spend weeks in there copying out all the documents by hand, but I think life is probably too short for that.




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