The owner of a share or shares in a company or corporation.
In many instances, the registered shareholders of companies are nominees which prevents identification of the real-life beneficial owners.
Registers of beneficial ownership are meant to address this issue, but none do so effectively as yet, not least because only the holders of stakes of more than 25% are usually required to be disclosed and this rule is easy to arbitrage or evade.
Shareholders do not own the assets of the company in which they own a share and have no claim over those assets unless the company is liquidation when in most instances companies are insolvent with few if any funds then being available for distribution to shareholders.
Shareholders are entirely dependent upon the decision of the directors of the company in which they invest for the payment of dividends: they cannot enforce a claim to be paid, even by passing a resolution in an annual general meeting. They would have to replace the directors instead, which in most quoted companies almost never happens as a result of a shareholder resolution.
As such the idea that a company is run in the interest of shareholders makes little sense, and nor do the ideas behind the concept of shareholder value have any substance to them.
This fact also makes a mockery of the idea that an auditor should address their audit report to the shareholders of a company when those shareholders have one of the weakest relationships with a company amongst all its stakeholders.
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