As anyone who has ever started a business knows, the first and possibly most important decision you have to make is, "What form will your business take?"
Will you just do business under your own name, file for a "fictitious name," form a partnership with someone, or choose a business form that protects your personal estate? Most choose the latter, working as either a corporation, an LLC, or a limited partnership.
The essence of these business forms is that the Outside World would then be dealing with the new legal entity, and not with you. So if your company makes children's toys and some kid gets killed or injured playing with the toy, the BUSINESS gets sued and not YOU. This legal "wall" between your business and you is usually referred to as the "corporate veil."
As long as you go by the rules in your business dealings, the corporate veil remains effective. You don't co-mingle your finances with those of the business. You make business decisions based on the interests of the business, and only secondarily for yourself.
If the business gets "big," and you eventually hire managers, while you step back into the pure investor role, you don't run the business from behind the veil. You may exert influence as an INVESTOR, but you don't do it as a dictator or manager.
And so we have Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family. They have jumped through all the hoops to keep the corporate veil intact, but the Nation's Attorneys General are not satisfied with the more-then-ten-Billion dollars that is available through bankruptcy/liquidation; they want to access the wealth of the Sackler family. Why? Not because there is any legitimate legal argument to pierce the corporate veil, but because THEY WANT IT. Because the family's wealth was derived from the profits of Purdue Pharma.
Wait. Isn't that the case with every family-owned corporation? OF COURSE the family retains wealth that it has taken from the company in the form of dividends (and whatever) over the years. But that is no justification - legally or morally - to pierce the corporate veil.
This doesn't even get into the legal fallacy of getting judgments against an entity without any evidence that THEIR PRODUCT specifically caused any harm to any individual. Or that every shred of literature put out by Pursue contained a warning that the product was addictive, as did every salesperson, as did every doctor who prescribed it, and as every user who ever took it knew. No, the Sacklers have already given up the defenses that the law and sanity would allow, letting the political opportunists kill and liquidate the profitable company without a significant battle.
While it's difficult to sympathize with billionaires, this is bullshit.
