Public Venture in Private Companies Through Crowdfunding Method of Peer-to-Peer Lending in Malaysia

Abstract

Digital funding platforms have been contemporaneously developed and utilised as a medium to enable businesses and companies to seek funds and to raise capital for any kind of commercial purposes, at any time or place. Such technology allows the service providers to invite the public to participate in generating funds for the businesses and companies in need. Through this mechanism, it is factual that funds are contributed by the public, while the law clearly provides the restriction of the public to invest or deposit or hold equity in private companies. Allowing the public to directly invest in private companies would be considered as illegal considering the legal restriction imposed on the private companies under the statute. Therefore, this article aims to study the legality of venturing this public money into the business investment of private companies. The focus of this study is the governing law in Malaysia in respect of the legality of funding private companies through online social lending namely peer-to-peer lending (P2P lending). This study is conducted by way of contents analysis of various provisions of relevant legislations. The outcomes of this study show that digital social lending such as P2P lending, has grown and been accepted by various natures of enterprises and private companies in order to start-up their business operation in Malaysia, as it compliments the limitation for private companies to invite the public to venture into their business.

Behind the flexibility: insufficient occupational injury protection of gig workers in China

“…According to the data from the project “Improving China's Institutional Capacity toward Universal Social Protection” of ILO in 2020, 2.5% of nonstandard employment workers had been involved in an accident at work, and 44.5% of these accidents occurred in the course of working on the platform. The lack of protection for gig workers is common ( 10 – 12 ). From January to July 2022, the number of consultations involving gig workers in Guangdong Province in China was 9,139, an increase of 50.3% year-on-year, with a monthly average of 1,305 consultations, with contract disputes, tort liability disputes, and labor disputes as the main types of consultations.…”