4 ms·
Would Zirtual's investors be on the hook?
by subliminalzen 11y ago
Would Zirtual's investors be on the hook?
- harryh 11y agoIANAL but almost certainly not. This is one of the primary purposes of corporations: to limit liability.
- davidu 11y agoActually, an exception often exists for owed or unpaid employee wages -- then directors can be held responsible for those. But I don't think that's the case here.
- greenyoda 11y agoIt looks like the employees were indeed owed some unpaid wages. The article says: "Moreover, employees were only paid through August 7—but they didn't know this until the email arrived in the early morning of August 11."
- Gibbon1 11y agoI think that only applied ever to hourly, and even that I think was changed during the Reagan Admin. I think creditors with unpaid wages aren't even senior anymore.
- greenyoda 11y agoBeing a corporation doesn't limit liability from criminal prosecution, however. The company fraudulently let the employees work for their last week, presumably knowing that it didn't have the money to pay them. And they defrauded the employees by canceling their insurance after having taken their insurance payments. The article said: "The company's HR chief had quit abruptly a week before, allegedly posting in a Facebook group that she didn't want to be party to doing anything illegal." I think that was a very smart move. The founders could end up facing criminal charges for their actions. (This, of course, wouldn't affect the investors, unless they conspired with the founders to defraud the employees.)
- harryh 11y agoYa. That's never going to happen.
- ken47 11y agoWhy are you so certain?
- scintill76 11y agoMight the HR chief still be in trouble for knowing something illegal/fraudulent was going on and not reporting/stopping it? At least ethically that's a grey area, and legally I'd guess it was not smart to allegedly document that she knew it with an FB post.