Write a 10 pages paper on the immense diverse nature of company law: the concept of corporate personality. The narrow view, as embodied in the Companies Acts holds that a company’s property, rights and liabilities belong to the company only. Yet, as is the case with many such legislative provisions, exceptions are inevitable, and the narrow view anticipated the coming of the wider view which holds that persons do not have any effect on and are not considered in relation to a company’s legal rights and obligations. The law reluctantly, but quite rightly acknowledges that exceptions exist, and both common law and statutory exceptions serve to treat ‘the rights or liabilities or activities of a company as the rights or liabilities or activities of its shareholders’ in certain circumstances. (Atlas Maritime Co. SA v Avalon Maritime Ltd (No. 1) [1991] 4 All ER 769 per Staughton LJ at 779). Yet, is there any systematic application of these exceptions? Is a systematic application indeed possible? One cannot help but notice the irony of the paradoxical term ‘systematic exception’, and perhaps to seek one is a futile exercise. This is especially so if one is to focus on the requirement that directors act in the best interests of the company: exactly what are – and what can be – the best interests of the company? Is this not simply a term laid open to the definition at will? On the other hand, it is not a novelty that the statutory exceptions to corporate personality are not easily successful. the Salomon principle is a fundamental one and is not to be easily set aside.