The 7th day of August, 2020 will remain a memorable day in the Nigeria corporate law regime. It is the day President Muhammadu Buhari signed into law a New Company and Allied Matters Act, 2020 (New CAMA) which introduced new provisions that promotes the ease of doing business to ensure a progressive development in Nigeria business and economic landscape. The new CAMA undeniably, provides a robust framework for reforming identified onerous legal, regulatory and administrative bottlenecks which hitherto impeded investments in Nigeria therefore introducing provisions which are in tangent with the technological realities of the 21st Century. Consequently, a major innovation introduced by the New CAMA, is the provision of Section 240(2) which empowers a private company to hold its general meetings electronically provided that such meetings are conducted in accordance with the articles of the company. It is therefore in this light that this article seeks to examine the effects of shareholders activism vis-à-vis the holding of a virtual meetings, the challenges of virtual meetings, and whether there can be an alternative to virtual meetings under the Act. It further recommends the ways to address the ensuing challenges of virtual meetings.
Company meetings are key to the decision-making process of a company. It is an avenue through which a company deliberates and makes decisions bordering on its management, control and administration.1 Thus, company meetings which could either be a company’s shareholders/members meetings, Board of Directors (BoD) meetings, Annual General Meetings (AGM) or of their committees meetings are an essential aspect of companies’ decision-making process, with firm roots in corporate governance.
Accordingly, at a company’s meeting, members’ active participation is important and desirable because it provides attendees with the opportunity to make enquiries, provide inputs and objective criticism, receive clarification, and be generally informed about the company’s activities and wellbeing, to guide decision making.3 As such, companies’ meetings, particularly AGMs, afford shareholders the opportunity to consider the progress and development of the company and to take necessary action to safeguard their investment, interest and promote those of the company.4 Consequently, shareholder activism has become a force for good in corporate