Abuse of the Right of a Company Member When Submitting a Request for Information

Introduction: civil law is essential for the stability of economic turnover. The norms of this industry regulate, among other things, the forms of entrepreneurial activity, whose most common ones are business companies. In this regard, the purpose of the work is to study and compare the information rights of business companies’ members and to assess the possibility of abuse of such rights. Methods: the methodological framework for the study is a set of methods of scientific cognition, including such main ones as the methods of forecasting, consistency, analysis, and comparative law. Results: based on the legal analysis of the norms of the Law on LLC and the Law on JSC, the differentiation of the information rights of the members of LLC and JSC is carried out. The questions are raised about the significant difference in information rights. Conclusions: the study reveals a significant difference in the information rights of minority and majority shareholders and a joint-stock company. It is established that the rights of members in a joint-stock company with a share from 1 to 25%, under the pretext of combating the abuse of rights on their part, are unreasonably limited by the evaluation criterion of a business purpose that must be specified for access to information. It is proposed to exclude the absence of a business purpose of the transaction when requesting information from the grounds for refusal to provide it, since this contradicts the basic principles of the civil legislation, on whose basis the good faith of the participants in legal relations is assumed until proven otherwise.