Are there any rules which prevent a corp from owning majority voting stock in more than one AAA corp?

No rules I'd imagine, but the corps themselves would stop this happening. There's never enough stock floating around to buy up a majority, and they're massively valuable so you're talking billions of nuYen in shares.

Corps nowadays are set up to protect against buyouts and hostile takeovers, I can only imagine what it's like in Shadowrun.

A majority voting stock means the stockholder has more than half the voting stock. In such case, the owned company is considered a subsidiary of the owning company.

As far as we know, in such case, a subsidiary AAA rating "transfers" to its parent company. For instance, JRJ International has AAA rating guaranteed by the Corporate Court founding charter. When it was taken over by Fuchi Industrial Electronics, Fuchi was treated as having the AAA rating. But as soon as Fuchi Industrial Electronics sold JRJ, it lost AAA rating.

(Well, it did not exactly happened that way, as Fuchi President/CEO Richard Villiers kept the sale of JRJ to Novatech secret for some time, so Fuchi only lost AAA rating after he disclosed it)

So if there was to be two AAA subsidiaries owned by the same corporation, I guess the parent corporation would be treated as one single AAA corporation. Such a mechanism would prevent a single corporation from claiming multiple judge seats or owns more than one share in the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinshaft Bank.

But in effect, corporations who do get AAA rating are supposed to be the pillars on which world economy rest. To some extent, it's a bit like asking nowadays "Is it okay for a permanent member of the UN Security Council to invade another?" Not that the answer is similar, but if you're in a situation where this can happen, the world is so fucked up that you may as well throw any rule you previously held on by the window.

It would be an unusual turn of events to see that much stock being shifted, but it could happen.

I means look at Ares. The three largest shareholders Damien Knight (23.7%), Arthur Vogel (24.1%), Gavilan Ventures (12.2%) control 60% of the stock, so you could discretely buy up the remaining 40% share would make you a force to be reckoned with as the largest stock holder. But you could still be blocked on a vote if the other 3 joined together to oppose, but that is not a certainty as this is a group that really don't care for each other, but they will guard the bottom line so as long as you do not threaten it you would be pretty much the head cheese.

Again it is not majority vote, but it would still wield considerable power.

You can't buy up that much stock discretely though, there are all kinds of alarms and warnings and stuff. Bells and whistles and flashing red lights. That's why the Damien Knight takeover happened in a nano-second and was an unprecedented event (and he still only got 23%) around which a lot of canon is written. Even this would be hard to replicate because once it's know about it's protected against.

I think you are confusing what Damien did with a regular hostile takeover.

The alarms and bells are set in place to stop the ULTRA RAPID superpurchase of stocks using the delays in the system and fluctuations in reporting sales/updating stock ownership to snap up stocks that are being traded before anyone else has a crack at them so as to avoid a repeat of what Damien Knight did. It really wasn't a level playing field in that particular situation and hence the system set in place to try and keep it level.

By discrete I was not implying doing any dirty tricks, but rather just buying up stock as a normal trader, possibly through multiple parties if I didn't want people to realize it was one person buying it all up. This is still a standard practice.

There is NO law against me as a person from buying stocks on the regular stock market as they become available as it is a level playing field and there may be other buyers doing the same.

The only real obstacle may be anti-trust laws if I were trying to take control of two or more similar companies so as to gain a monopoly on a particular section of industry, but that is another tale.

Now granted it is unlikely that many people are dumping their stocks, but there is always some level of stock trading going on and I have just as much right as any other buyer to try and obtain that stock.

Plus as I am buying on the normal market this will be noted and some people may then also try and buy this up as people like to follow trends, which raises the price of the stock meaning if I want to buy more I probably have to pay more for those if any are available. The stock exchange will monitor this, but so long as I operate as a regular trader they will not interfere. If I try to pull any digital hanky panky or suddenly dump stock to try and change prices they may well step in to act as a speedbump while they figure out the cause.

As we pointed out, 60% of the stock is already locked up by the big 3, so a majority holding postion for Ares is out of the question. But if I got the patience and nuyen to burn I could still acquire 40% if I so wanted and that would buy me a place on the board, indeed Vogal and Gavalian Ltd might well want to get cozy with me as either of them with me would give effective control on any major votes.

In real life, there actually are laws that force you to publicly disclose when you reach given shareholding thresholds. In the US, it is the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. You must declare to the FTC any transaction that will led you to own for more than $70.9 millions in share if the "owning" or "owned" company has annual sales or total assets above $283.6 millions. In other countries, it is most often a percentage threshold (usually several thresholds, for instance 5%, 10%, 25%, 33.3% and 50%).

So you can do it, but you cannot do it secretly. Getting caught circumventing such legal declaration results in the transactions being cancelled (and fined).

A few years ago, Porsche did find a very imaginative way to bypass German regulation to take over Volkswagen, but it kinda backfired. Hard. I don't know if the loophole was closed since.

Theoretically, you could get around those laws by entering into contracts with other parties wherein you will fund them to purchase stock until just below the minimum disclosure level and allow them to use the stock as they see fit (but not sell it) until such time as all of your eggs are in multiple disparate baskets, at which point they are all obliged contractually to sell the stocks to you at some nominal fee. You rocket past the thresholds which you own in an instant, and disclose, but by then it's too late.

Of course, remember that this is Shadowrun we're talking about. If the Corporate Court doesn't like what you're doing with your money, they will straight-up fucking assassinate you with orbital weapons and say "yeah, what he was doing was totally legal. We did him in anyway and we weren't subtle about it, who feels ballsy enough to do something about it."

It is called "concerted action" and it's also illegal. Your only chance is that it is more difficult to prove for the FTC (don't brag about it in your e-mails). So it's rather the opposite : in theory, you are not allowed to do it ; practically, it's doable.

Alright, let me expound further. In the top 10 AAA corps right now, only 4 AAA corps are vulnerable to history rewrites. As in it would be easier for me to rewrite the history of those 4 corps in such a way that my AA corp would be able to get a significant amount of voting stock in them.

I am not talking about more than 50% in each of those AAA corps as that would be quite impossible but holding the largest amount of stock in each of the 4 is actually quite doable.

The 4 vulnerable corps in my game from most vulnerable to hardest to crack would be 1)Horizon, 2)Neo-Net 3)Evo 4)Wuxing.

The other 6 are too well-established, too ethnic or have too stable a history for anyone to take a crack at them. Also the vulnerable 4 have only recently been established or had recently suffered major internal conflicts which allow for my corp to come into the game.

1) Horizon - no material assets, almost all virtual assets plus it is a rather new player.. Horizon would be the only AAA corp which my corp has a chance at gaining more than 50% of the the voting stock contrary to the above viewpoints.. There are no information about who's the major stockholders in Horizon so you can rewrite the history and stockholder profiles as you see fit..

2) Neo-Net - a partnership of three different company, Novanet, Erika and Tranys.. each of those three companies have histories and internal conflicts which you can easily rewrite so that your corp will have controlling interests in those corps from way back in 2030s.. but 25% shareholding stock or thereabouts is the most which I can give to my corp

3) Evo- you can easily rewrite the history of Evo so that your corp can easily work with Buttercup and Yuri to snatch shares from the Japanese stockholders.. as usual 25% Evo stock is the max which I can give to my corp without altering the history too much.. Also I have a very huge New Way Yakuza comprising of metahumans, koreans, basically japanese society outcasts and such which had banded together under my command which gave me the plot excuse to invade Evo, a former japanese AAA..

4) Wuxing - not much is written about wuxing but they only became AAA after Big D gave them 200 million dollars.. As I have very heavy triad hitters and a Great Form Chinese Dragon (Yeah yeah it is called Gold Dragon Society under the command of the Great Form Chinese Dragon.. they are Red Dragon's main rivals in other words) under my command.. There is this plot excuse for my triads to grab a controlling interest in Wuxing.. say 30% - 40% ..

Now for the rest

5) Ares? too UCAS .. my powerbase is in Tibet/Asia so geographically speaking, i wouldn't have too much of an influence on them...

6) Aze? too South American .. again my powerbase isn't in SA except for maybe Amazonia and even that is weak

7) Mitsushima, Renraku, Shiwase? too Japanese/too Samurai/too Yakuza/too Imperial which make them the hardest corp to penetrate

8 ) SK - this is bloody obvious.. it is a private corp owned by L.. no way anyone can get in..

That parent company has to own more than 50% of an AAA corp. But if you own less than 50% of an AAA corp, theoretically and practically speaking, you are not an AAA qualitified.

So if Lowynr wants to own shares in each of the AAA corp, there is nothing which prevents him from doing so as long as he doesn't own more than 50% of each AAA corp.

Assuming you're the GM, the worlds rules work how you say they do. Take what you need from Canon, ignore what contradicts it, then full steam ahead. Tell your players when they sign up that they'll be playing in Pattyhulez continuity, let them know of any deviations from Canon that their characters would know, and you're golden.

It's what I do.

Let's not forget that banking is probably different in Shadowrun than what we're used to... and this has some wide reaching implications.

Part of the reason companies today are so keen on keeping their stock high is because this is their only defense against getting bought out by speculative investors. This is possible, because our existing banking system allows insane leverage, that is, you can borrow money, then use the borrowed money as collateral to borrow again... rise and repeat. Many companies (what we'd consider B or C in SR terms) ended, because some legal criminal in a suit, realized that Company B had assets worth way more than what it costs to buy majority in shares... so they leverage themselves up, buy out the shares, then proceed to sell off the company, ruining it in the process.

This likely can't happen to AAA companies in Shadowrun. Why? Because they run the banks, and they'd cut anyone off at the ankles who'd start this kinda financial shenanigans. Do AAA companies still care about their stock? Hell yeah, they're still a company and the owners want a return on their investment... but unlike our insane Real World™, said companies don't care about the share price only, instead they plan long term.

If there was *one* benefit to the mega-corp takeover, then it's the stability they brought to the financial sector. With the corps literally owning the world, bankers would suddenly be put on a leash... of course it's all relative. 3rd world countries, local governments are probably still getting the shaft from various refinancing deals, especially with how corrupt most officials are.

Ok, lemme get this straight.

You want to know, as a PC, which AAA megacorp would be easiest to get controlling interest in, therefore making you an AAA CEO?



Gotta admit, you've got ambition.

All right, *cracks knuckles* what you have to realize is that very rarely does one individual own 51+% of any corporation. Most of the time, they only personally own a small share, but hold enough influence with the other major shareholders that they'll vote their way. So, all you need to do is get enough shares to get noticed, then convince enough of the other major shareholders to follow you.

Pretty simple, right?

The easiest way to get a controlling interest in a Megacorp?

Challenge Lofwyr to a hand of Texas Hold 'Em in such a way that he cannot, dare not, refuse, winner takes Saeder-Krupp. Win.

(How you'll put the ownership of SK in such a perilous position as to make gambling for it an attractive option for a Great Dragon is an exercise for your imagination.)

Fire. I'm not certain how, but the solution to any problem can eventually be boiled down to 'Fire'.

I've been saying that a lot lately, haven't I?

Hey Cain, let me summarize everything.

No I do not want to be an AAA CEO nor do I even want my AA corp to be an AAA.

However what I want is for my AA corp to have significant controlling interest (not necessarily more than 50% .. even 25% stock is good enough as long as my corp is the largest stockholder in the AAA corp) in 4 AAA corps so that my AA corp can influence the votes of 3-4 justices in corporate court at any one time.

Of course, there must be a way to hide the fact that my AA corp is a major stockholder in 4 AAA corps.. i was thinking that my AA corp is holding shares in other AA corps through dummy corporations and these other AA corps hold the shares in these AAA corps without anyone realizing that all these different AA corps are linked together under one umbrella.

Get the picture omae?

It is not a Megacorp. It is 4 Megacorps.

Yeah....... Good luck with that.

I'm pretty sure the Corporate Court reserves unto itself the right to oblige you to divest yourself of your holdings in X or Y corp, specifically to avoid conflicts of interest like that.

Indeed... But if one is rewriting history... *shrug*

Considering that the required amount of cash for that is somewhat on par with the whole market worth of an AAA, I'd say such a think is quite hard to manage for an AA - In my opinion there's simply no way to keep that sort of budget completely in the dark.. Also Worth considering is that the remoter the chain,the weaker your hold will be on whoever officially holds the stocks. Especially if the controling interest in the AAA don't like what your proxies vote for and start implementing a more proactive management of the minor stockholders's vote.

Maybe you can manage it for a single AAA (and even there I'm dubious, there's no that much stocks floating around that can be nabbed discretly), but no way you can do it with four. And art Dankwalther is a good example of what happens when you rub the big boys the wrong way.

Maybe it's my ASD, but I still can't tell if your serious.

But, operating on that assumption: Assuming the Corporate Court works like our current system, there's nothing stopping you from simply buying the shares you want. You'd have to work to shell companies to not get noticed, and the moment you asserted your shares as a power bloc, people would start figuring it out, but it's possible. Of course, how you'd get the money to buy those shares is beyond me; the reason why people form shareholder voting blocs is because it's cheaper and easier than buying everyone out.

Something that's technically easier, though, is to influence individual shareholders. Most of the shares of a company are held by private individuals, who each own a handful of shares in their investment portfolios. Since Mom and Pop investors have no security, you may find it easier to, ahem, "persuade" a couple hundred thousand individual shareholders to sign over their voting rights than to arm-wrestle Lowfyr for shares.


Yeah; if it were that simple, Art would have simply bought out all the corps he hated and ruined them that way. I can only assume that the net worth of an AA or AAA was far more than he could afford.

If you, as a character, own a AA and can afford to have a controlling interest in 4 AAAs through sheer force of cash, it's time to retire the character. Just saying.

sounds like that belongs in the "Its time to retire your character when" thread lol

That's where I got the idea. The point is that at this point, where does the character have to go? what's their motivation for running if they own 4/10ths of the world superpowers. They can literally buy a country and retire! Their shares are netting them more per week than most runners make in a month. There is no reason for them to be getting their own hands dirty at this point.

there is still 6/10 before they achieve total world domination *shrug* make runs for world Domination

or use your staggering amounts of cash to get runners to do your work for you, rather than risk losing everything and getting killed by putting yourself on the front lines.

As a general rule, if favorite character gets too powerful in our games they retire to either Johnson or Fixer roles, with the new runners then being hired to further their agenda.

you could also take them into a Mentor role for those that don't fit Johnson or Fixer roles. or occasional Mercenary.

True.

I actually like the idea of Retired PC runners becoming trainers for later games as well. Imagine your 12 skill Firearms master (12 skill in several types of guns) opening up his own Firearms Training Facility for Runner's.

yeah, but when was the last time you saw a character with the instruction skill?

players maybe not, but a GM can rule that after a Runner retires he may pick it up. it makes more sense that, unless it is a direct part of their story, a runner might pick the instruction skill up after he retires to pass his skills (some skills) on to the younger generation of runner's

Chances are that you will be on the front lines whether you want to put yourself there or not. Better to be the do-er rather than the do-ee. If it was a game I was GMing, such a thing would not come to pass without the character having access to some sort of business and/or law related skill/skill set. He simply wouldn't know how to pull it off. However if someone were to have such control over AAA corps, I'd say that he has just become a target and he has to be very 1337 to avoid being Art-ificed, at the very least access to Lanier-level in terms of security skill or Kane-level in terms of being a 404.

More in a *minute* than more runners make in a month. Just sayin'.

Seriously, this guy has posted requests for a spirit with a skill of 30. I can only assume that his game has exceeded the normal limits, in terms of karma and cash, and he's trying to figure out what to do with enough power and wealth to make Lowfyr weep with envy. I don't tell people how they should play, I just respond to requests (albeit with tongue in cheek at times).


That's Cain, and thank you, I am good at not being noticed.

Yeah, there's been a few weird questions popping up recently. The Police one too

Though, from reading the other topics, the corporation isn't a player controlled one. Pattyhulez is the GM and the corp is I presume his 'big bad'. The reason you're confused is because it's only ever referred to as 'my corp'

The point is, as GM, really you can do whatever you want as long as the players buy it and you all have fun. Things like this don't really make sense in a real-world setting, but in your game you can do whatever you want

As far as thought experiments go it's an interesting one, but go ahead and put me in the "it couldn't be done" camp. For the simple problem of too many moving parts.

1) Money - You need gobs of it, astronomical amounts of it. You'd have to knock off a Great Dragon, then invest their horde wisely for a few years, then maybe you'd have enough, maybe.

2) Intractability - A lot of people who have the requisite shares you need just won't want to sell at any price you care to mention. Their stock shares make them kings and neo-feudal lords and there just isn't anything to move up to in many cases. Getting them under duress might be possible but poses it's own challenges.

3) Autonomy, part of the whole point of putting the CC up on a space station is to give the justices a fair amount of autonomy, even from their parent corps. That's why there's justices at all and not just the CEO's of the corporations tendering votes from dirt side. There is a non-zero chance a justice might recieve your discretely worded memo about how they should vote in keeping with your master plan and reply with some suggestion of sex acts impossible for most metatypes in the language of your choosing.

4) Secrecy, you have to surmount all the above problems likely requiring the combined efforts of more people then were involved in the Manhattan project and keep it absolute secret, because if you don't the powers that be are going to annihilate you so thoroughly that your remains won't be found with a really really good electron microscope.

You'd be better off trying to convince your four puppet corps to just overtly try and take over the world, go big or go home.

There is certainly a way to stop an unwanted takeover of your company in Shadowrun.

It's called "hiring shadowrunners". Usually involves bullets and explosives.

Also, if anyone wants more "wait, you're asking WHAT?" type questions, go look through the original poster's post history.


-k

Indeed... Pattyhulez has an interesting History...

I wouldn't be so sure. Richard Villiers is a corporate raider of the type you mentioned. He plays the AAA leagues perfectly well. So far he's made two big AAA corps (Fuchi and Novatech), watched them implode, and come out richer than he started. NeoNet is next.

Sure, he's a sociopath, but he's a very successful one. He is, by himself, a AAA corp, because he owns 100% of JRJ International, which has a charter seat on the Court. He really can't lose it either - it's entirely a paper corp by now. The only way to take his Corporate Court seat away from him would be by killing him, or possibly an Omega Order (which would probably still involve killing him).

Regarding the original topic:
Playing stock games with the AAAs is fatal. Look up Art Dankwalther, who was assassinated by the Court via THOR shot. He wasn't doing anything illegal - he was, in fact playing the same games the AAAs do. He just didn't have the protection of being an insider. He was an inconvenience to Mr. Villiers and the others, so was murdered in an extremely blatant way. No country is going to attempt to charge the Court with murder, so the message is given - don't mess with the AAAs.

Indeed, I was thinking of Villers as well.

Rather than trying to subvert a AAA that is already in place, maybe the OP should look at building his own by absorbing and reorganizing a number of A's and AA's.

Even if a bit shy of full AAA by itself, it could then merge with one of the AAA's much like Villiers did in forging the original Fuchi.

Again it all depends on what the OP is wanting from this.

I wonder what Shadowrun history would be like if nations and non-megacorporate Great Dragons banded together after Art Dankwalther's murder to inform the Corporate Court that blatantly murdering someone who was simply inconvenient to them was not acceptable, and would not be tolerated...

Followed by a Force 58 Wreck Space Station spell being targeted against Zurich Orbital from one of those GDs on the ground, ripping it to shreds and reminding them that orbital weapons are not the ultimate trump card.

That is not a bad idea.

Conversely though we do need that evil/oppression to a degree as it gives us something to set ourselves against.

How much fun would a shadowrun be for the party to pull a run on St. Mary's Hospital for the Poor to steal all their meds from the terminal children's ward to sell off onto the black market?

Would there have ever been a Great Ghost Dance if there had not been the whole Indian internment and suppression?

Without being backed into a corner like that, the various tribes would never have been able to sufficiently organize that sort of mojo. The map would be far different indeed.

It fails the basic question of why would they bother. As long as they maintain parity of effect there's no reason to try and defang an ability they might need.

In other words: The powerful really like the ability to murder the ever loving heck out of those less powerful then them. They have little incentive to prevent that sort of behavior in like powered entities as long as they are not on the recieving end.

Remember the GD's eat people that displease them. The method may be different but the effect is the same, it's good to be a king.

Not all of the Great Dragons are Lofwyr or Sirrug. Some of them actually do subscribe to the idea that the rule of law ought to trump the rule of the might of the greedy. If a few of them and a few of the remaining powers with sufficient military might to back their play banded together to officially put the corporate court on notice that megacorps are not the only players in the "superpower" camp, they'd be listened to. Especially if they did something like, say, erasing every single orbital weapons platform in the skies.

(Seriously, a GD probably has eyesight good enough to hit them without even a telescope. With a telescope, they could definitely do it. Hell, a weapons platform is probably small enough to be adequately Wrecked by a strong magician with a telescope.)

Name one, with the exception of Hestaby (which may have all been a PR stunt) most if not all the greats run more to avarice then altruism. The Philipino great is possibly an exception, and even he might be only an adult.

Simply put the GD's have more investment in the status quo then not, and have little interest in checking the corporate court's power. Hell most of them seem to randomly have control over various corps when it's convenient for the writers to twist and reveal it.

Why would the nations of the world object to killing Dankwalther? He's the guy who randomly destroyed corps and put thousands of unemployed people on the street, with untold additional disruption, just for practice! This was not some unjustified killing just because he was annoying someone.

Because nothing he did was illegal. He was using the same tools, and getting the same effects as the Megas do. He was, however, not in the AAA club, and had a personal agenda that was going to be a problem for one of the AAAs. The issue wasn't what he was doing - it was that he was not a Mega but was becoming an economic threat to a Mega.

The AAAs have a gentleman's agreement. Nobody messes with the balance of power but AAAs. Basic dystopic Machiavellian politics - the AAAs have the power, and play their games against each other, but any outsider who wants to horn in will get stomped by all parties.

The Great Dragons and the IEs would understand perfectly - they operate the same way.

Possibly relevant to OP's question: When Miles Lanier received a ton of shares of Renraku as part of Dunkelzahn's will and all the accusations of conflict of interest went flying, Lanier was forced to sell his stock in one of the AAAs (Novatech, I think) by the Corporate Court. Of course, it all worked out for him and Villiers in the end, but if any one legal entity (individual or corporation) was able to get enough ownership to have controlling interests in four different AAAs, they'd have to be extremely good at covering their tracks to avoid that happening to them. Of course, if they ever actually use their influence, it opens up the opportunity for someone else to learn about it and figure out who's doing it/why it's happening.

I wonder if you wouldn't be better off just saying that your AA has some kind of "influence" over the AAAs, rather than specifying ownership. If the goal is to be able to get certain things done, blackmailing someone else that has the authority is just as easy as getting authority yourself, and there's less conflict-of-interest laws to go through...

Miles was forced to sell because he left Fuchi to go to Renraku and Fuchi's fortunes nosedived. Leading to all those accusations.

I wonder if it is possible to have enough shares in multiple AAAs, enough to have a board seat but not having a controlling interest.