The pernicious practice of seeking redress in the courts when one of your unwise investments has gone wrong – although fully justified in theory, in practice, as the American experience shows, it does nothing for shareholder rights or redress, but simply puts not unsubstantial fortunes from company treasuries into lawyers’ pockets and clogs up the courts with meretricious cases – has spread to this side of the Atlantic, and Philips Electronics NV faces a small group of Dutch shareholders seeking legal redress from the company for allegedly misleading them by reporting a slump in profits in 1990 two months after issuing an upbeat annual report on the state of its business.
