They're not really shells. They're very small companies created to limit the exposure of the owners to liability. This is not weird or abnormal in business. Real estate guys use separate entities for their projects all the time. If one gets in trouble, it leaves the others intact. That is the whole point of limited liability.
A coworker had his house destroyed by errors on an adjacent building site, and he faces the real risk of the real estate guys declaring a loss on this one and moving on to the next "shell company".
Thnk about that for a moment, because it's not even possible. How are you going to finance a second building when the first one has the ability to suck up all the cash flow? No bank would do it. No equity partners would do it. Throwing out limited liability is a huge deal.
Courts should have the option of making directors or whatever personally liable in the case of gross negligence (like cratering an adjacent building).
Either that, or mandatory insurance for these cases.
It's just unfair that someone is made homeless and faces the threat of being left out in the cold while the persons responsible are raking massive profits elsewhere. It's not a faceless meteorite crash, it was gross negligence.
In the case of patent trolls, "piercing the veil" is also complicated.
There's also the common practice of naming a figurehead as the person responsible for a company, while the real owners don't figure in the legal documents (we call them "testaferros" over here). I don't know what the solution is (I wish I did), but the current system doesn't seem to be working out well.
