주식에 관한 전자등록제도 시행에 즈음한 법적 문제점 검토 - 증권거래의 투명성 제고 측면을 중심으로 -

Abstract

On March 22, 2016, the Act on the Electronic Registration of Shares and Bonds, Etc. of Korea(the “Act”) has been legislated, which is to become effective within 4 years thereafter. The legislation of the Act is the first concrete step which Korea has taken to introduce the dematerialization of securities including stocks, bonds and other investment securities. Though the Act does not provides for the dematerialization of the securities in a full scale, first of all listed securities will be mandatorily dematerialized. In this article, the author focuses on the legal issues on the electronic registration system relating to the shares of stocks under the Act and evaluates the system in terms of its impact on the enhancement of the transparency on securities transactions. For her evaluation purposes, she pays attention to two factors: i)the quality of access to the informations on electronic securities transactions by the interested parties and ii)the level of difficulty for minority shareholders in exercising their rights against the issuers. In Part II, this article examines the electronic registration system for the disclosure of information on the electronic issuance of stocks and finds that it has significant limitations in terms of its coverage and it lacks sufficient mechanism enough to ensure the timeliness and the accuracy of the information at the stage of the electronic issuance of stocks. In Part III, the author analyzes the electronic registration system in terms of the production, concentration and dissemination of the informations originated from the electronic securities transactions in the secondary market. She finds that it has different facets for each of the interested parties including the issuers, shareholders and security holders. In terms of the production of such informations, the system provides for a perfectly comprehensive platform. However the concentration of such informations shall be made only through the initiative of the issuer of stocks and only in a very limited circumstances. The access to such concentrated electronic information by the issuer is also permitted only in such circumstances. The shareholders have no direct access to such concentrated electronic informations and have to rely on the shareholders registry system, the link of which with the concentrated electronic informations needs further regulatory refinements. Also the Act needs to be supplemented to provide more access to the electronic informations to the pledgees. In Part IV, the author goes through various problems that might arise when minority shareholders are to exercise their rights with respect to the electronically registered shares of stock, including the issues regarding the correlation with the shareholders registry system under the Commercial Code and the strict limitations on the disposition of the electronically registered shares of stock during certain peracid of time in connection with the exercise of their rights. In Part V, the author appreciates the achievements of the Act in that all transactions on the electronically registered stocks shall go through the electronic registration system which, as a result, provides for a comprehensive platform to produce and concentrate all informations on the electronic issuances and trading of those stocks. However, she concludes that the Acts needs more attention to go forward to the ultimate stage where the electronic registration system concentrates all such informations constantly almost in a real time base and provides for the full accesses to those informations for all interested parties including the issuers, shareholders and pledgees.