Abstract

The steward-ownership model is a new method compared to the traditional governance of a company that sets itself, in a not necessarily alternative way, two main objectives: on the one hand, to ensure that the purpose of a company remains in the long term, even through the generations following that of the founders and, on the other, to organize the succession in the management of the company. To achieve these objectives, it may be functional to separate the economic rights of the members from the voting rights, which can be gained through different alternatives, including the model of the so-called perpetual purpose trust. In the second part of this paper, the model of the so-called perpetual purpose trust will be analyzed, considering it as an evolution of the corporate trust, that is, of that trust that holds shares in companies, in particular in its form of the voting trust.