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Your China Counter-Party Has a U.S. Subsidiary: So What!

Saturday, March 18, 2017 11:02
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(Before It's News)

China lawyersDoes the Chinese company with which you are doing a deal have a United States subsidiary? Does this mere fact make you feel better about doing a deal with its China parent company? Why? Do you not realize that it is likely to be legally irrelevant?

The always excellent, always informative, Hague Law Blog (by Aaron Lukken) wrote about this in the context of service of process in its post, You can’t simply serve a U.S. subsidiary. Aaron starts out by discussing how you need a compelling reason to “pierce the corporate veil” of a subsidiary company to each through and assert claims against its corporate parent since “the whole purpose of a corporation is to be a separate entity, a separate being from its owners, shielding the owners from liability if they didn’t have a part in wrongdoing.”

A couple years ago I was retained as an expert on corporate veil piercing for a case in Korea. As part of my work on that case, I researched the current state of corporate veil piercing and since that time I’ve probably stated something like the following to fellow lawyers at least a dozen times: “You know how difficult it is to pierce a corporate veil, well it’s even more difficult than you think. It seems that courts are now pretty much uniformly of the view that everyone now understands that Limited Liability companies and corporations protect the owners of those entities and corporate veil piercing is now nearly impossible unless there has been real fraud somewhere along the way.” Or to put it in non-legal terms, it ain’t gonna happen.

And yet again and again really smart in-house lawyers seem to ignore this when doing deals with big Chinese companies with U.S. subsidiaries. I cannot even count the times where such a lawyer has told me that they are not terribly worried about being able to pursue the big Chinese company on the other side of their deal because “we can always go after them here in the United States.” Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Unless the U.S. subsidiary is a party to the contract or a guarantor on the contract, to go after that subsidiary you need to be able to pierce the corporate veil and that ain’t gonna happen. When I tell them this, they then talk about how they still can seize the Chinese companies ownership interest in that U.S. subsidiary as if that is no big deal. But the problem is that is a really big deal and any Chinese company worth its salt has structured its ownership of its U.S. subsidiary through various levels of Hong Kong and Cayman Island and Virgin Island companies. So yes, if you are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating the corporate trail and engaging in discovery on just this one issue, you might succeed. But really?

Our China lawyers see the result of this thinking with contracts between American and Chinese companies that call for disputes to be resolved in a U.S. court. At least once a month, one of our China attorneys will get a call or an email from a U.S. lawyer seeking our help in taking a U.S. judgment (usually a default judgment) to China to enforce. The thinking of the U.S. lawyer is that all we need do is go to a China court and ask it to convert the U.S. judgment into a Chinese judgment and then send out the Chinese equivalent of a sheriff to the Chinese company and start seizing its assets until it pays. As we have so often written, this will not work:

After we tell the American lawyers how difficult it is to collect on a U.S. judgment against a Chinese company (note that I say difficult and not impossible — it is possible to employ “other methods” to collect on such a judgment), they will sometimes explain that is okay because they can still go after the U.S. subsidiary of the Chinese company with which they have the contract. But as stated above, that is expensive and difficult and may or may not lead to a good result.

Aaron’s post focuses on how service of process on a foreign company’s U.S. subsidiary does not constitute service on the parent company and he uses Chrysler Motors as an example:

Take Chrysler, for example. When you sue Chrysler over a defective Jeep, you’re pretty solid in just serving the Michigan outfit. But if you allege liability on the part of the parent company, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, N.V. (which we’ll just call FCA here– and I don’t mean the Fellowship of Christian Athletes), serving in Michigan ain’t gonna cut the mustard. You have to go abroad to get FCA on the hook. You can’t just hit Chrysler and assume that FCA is in the case, too.

The corporate veil doesn’t get pierced just because it hangs overseas.

Which means that if you want to serve Chrysler Automobiles N.V. you must do so in the Netherlands, where it is based. Again, it’s because the subsidiary is not the equivalent of the parent and vice-versa and as much as you may wish it otherwise, it ain’t. The same holds true for your China contract.

We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy.



Source: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2017/03/your-china-counter-party-has-a-u-s-subsidiary-so-what.html

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