Who determines the national identity of a corporation, and on what basis? The standard legal tests — incorporation, real seat, corporate control through equity ownership — have long provided a working answer. That answer is no longer sufficient. Corporate national identity has become a site of intense contestation and a first-order governance issue for boards, states, and markets — a development with profound practical and scholarly consequences.
The stakes are especially high in Singapore, which has become the preferred redomiciliation destination for major Chinese firms seeking to mitigate geopolitical exposure. For lawyers, business leaders, and policymakers, understanding corporate national identity through the legal facet alone now produces material blind spots. This lecture introduces a framework that exposes what the traditional legal lens misses. The implications reach across cross-border M&A, corporate governance, and the capacity of corporate law to absorb the geopolitical pressures now reshaping it.
For more information, please visit the
lecture website.
| Time (SGT) | Programme |
| 4.30pm | Registration |
5.00pm | Lecture - Corporate National Identity: What Lawyers Are Missing
Professor Dan W. Puchniak
Yong Pung How Professor of Law
Singapore Management University |
| 6.15pm | Q&A Session |
| 6.30pm | End of Event |
SPEAKER
Director, Centre for Commercial Law in Asia, Singapore Management University
European Corporate Governance Institute; Co-Editor, Independent Directors in Asia (Cambridge University Press)
Dr. Dan W. Puchniak is the Yong Pung How Professor at the Yong Pung How School of Law (SMU) and a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. He is a leading authority on the law concerning independent directors in Singapore and across Asia and has received numerous awards for his research and teaching on corporate law and governance. He has co-authored the Company Law chapter for the Singapore Academy of Law Annual Review of Singapore Cases for over a decade and served as a Roundtable Member for the ACRA Institute of Corporate Law. His corporate law scholarship has been cited by the Singapore Court of Appeal. He has delivered more than one hundred invited lectures at leading universities, regulators, and corporate institutions worldwide, and has acted as an expert in high-stakes corporate law disputes in Asia. Before entering academia, he practised corporate commercial litigation at one of Canada’s leading law firms.
