Reply #42: limited liability

[buddhamama]

this is important deals specificly with the Price Anderson Act contained in both Bills but far worse in the Senate's version.

--snip--

"A key object of the new corporate set-ups, says Scott Cullen, executive director of the East Hampton, New York-based STAR, is in a nutshell, to avoid liability. The nature of a limited liability corporation," said Cullen, an attorney, "is to insulate the owners and stockholders from liability in the event of litigation or some sort of accident."

"We are not saying that limited liability corporations in and of themselves are bad. But we are saying that the ownership of ultra-hazardous machines by limited liability corporations is extremely problematic," Cullen explained.

"The idea is to buy these things cheaply and to run them basically on skeleton crews thereby reducing operation and maintenance costs-to run these things into the ground," says Paul Gunter, head of the Reactor Watchdog Project at the Nuclear Information & Resource Service/World Information Service on Energy-Amsterdam.

The conclusion of Financial Insecurity: "Over the last ten years, the ownership of an increasing number of nuclear power plants has been transferred to a relatively small number of very large corporations. These large corporations have adopted business structures that create separate limited liability subsidiaries for each nuclear plant, and in a number of instances, separate operating and ownership entities that provide additional liability buffers."

"The limited liability structures being utilized are effective mechanisms for transferring profits to the parent/owner while avoiding tax payments. They also provide a financial shield for the parent/owner if an accident, equipment failure, safety upgrade, or unusual maintenance need at one particular plant creates a large unanticipated cost. The parent/owner can walk away, by declaring bankruptcy for that separate entity, without jeopardizing its other nuclear and non-nuclear investments."

--snip-- http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=4529