The ideological and juridical idea of what a corporation as a form is all about and what happens in the case of wrongs committed by such corporations is sought to be unpacked. The accepted notion in business and economics, which has seeped deeply in popular imagination too, that corporations exist primarily for benefiting their shareholders and hence their “accountability” is restricted to their shareholders only, is critically examined. For this, Milton Friedman’s influential conceptualisation of a corporation with the juridical construct of the corporate veil is interrogated and its far-reaching consequences through three recent important corporate cases in India are investigated.
