[AnthonyMouse]

> For example to make sure that a company can be held responsible when it breaks the law.

In general this has nothing to do with incorporation documents.

If a company unintentionally causes a large amount of damages, the company is going to get wiped out, but then you're just having the judge order the bank to transfer the company's assets to the victims. The owners of the company aren't particularly relevant except insofar as they now own a company whose value has been zeroed out, and they might be the ones to show up in court to argue against that being what should happen.

If the people at a company intentionally cause a large amount of damages, the corporation is irrelevant. If your "corporation" is in the business of stealing catalytic converters and the police come to arrest you, the person with the sawzall in their hands is going to jail, and if that person was hired to do it they're going to be offered a deal to testify against the person who hired them etc. Pointing to your articles of incorporation at that point isn't going to save you. That isn't what LLCs do, actual criminal enterprises will frequently have not listed the true principals on the documents anyway, and the government is going to try to prosecute the perpetrators rather than the patsies on the documents.

There is no real point in making this a burden for honest people. If they're honest then it doesn't matter. If they're not honest then you'd be a fool to trust what they wrote on a form anyway.

[aaravchen]

Is that actually how corporations work in the EU?

Only having experience in the US, I can tell you conclusively that if the company states it's job is to make and promote poison for untrained people to spray everywhere, let's call it "CircleHeavenward" for example, and they successfully convince enough people to buy and use it, but then it's found they knowingly told people to spray it unsafely and knew it would kill millions of people but his it, and millions of the customers neighbors are now dying, absolutely nothing will be done. Because they're a successful corporation and therefore completely immune to any responsibility for any outright criminal activity. Doubly so it they can successfully claim more than one person was involved in carrying out that criminal activity, and therefore the responsibility for it is distributed.

[AnthonyMouse]

Syngenta got sued over paraquat and has already agreed to pay more than $100M to one set of defendants while still being actively sued by others. Corteva is paying in excess of a billion dollars over PFAS. Bayer/Monsanto is paying in excess of ten billion over glyphosate. That's only what they've already agreed to pay; others can still sue them for more.

A lot of stuff is e.g. you have an old study showing that glyphosate causes cancer in mice in amounts orders of magnitude higher than typical human exposure. Plaintiffs are going to claim that means they knew it was dangerous, and maybe that's even enough to win their lawsuit. But lots of things cause cancer in mice in excessive amounts. Can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew it would cause cancer in humans in ordinary amounts? If not then you don't have enough to put them in prison. Also, which "them" is it? If you want a person, the actually guilty party is typically not the CEO, it's a middle manager who made the decision three decades ago and is now a retired non-billionaire. If you collected enough evidence then you could potentially put a middle class grandpa in prison for it. The actual reason this doesn't often happen isn't that corporations are rich.

But also, what does this have to do with the bureaucracy involved in entity formation? Is your theory that making it harder to start a small business would somehow have made it more likely for Monsanto to be prosecuted for whatever they did? How?