Constitutive documents

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Those formal bits and bobs that make your corporate personality flesh and blood: usually, a certificate of incorporation, memorandum and articles of association or, in more modern corporations, a constitution and for good order a certificate of good standing. All those things that set out who the company is, what it is therefore, and all that tedious stuff about shareholder meetings and board resolutions and so on.

In the old days it included the company’s objects and purpose, and anything it should do that was outside of those was ultra vires and void ab initio. This would give derivatives practitioners hives, what with derivatives being new-fangled, arcane and frankly dangerous things — financial weapons of mass destruction, right? — as they were almost certainly not within the objectives of most companies established before the Children of the Woods first wrought the deep magic which brought the first primordial sw-æps into existence, and as they had a habit of going, well, thermonuclear on the finance controllers who didn't understand them and had been suckered into loading up on FX trades by mercenary wolven salespeople at Gorgman Manley Pynch.

For fund entities it will usually generally include its information memorandum and investment management agreement even though neither, strictly speaking, play any kind of metaphysical role in converting your stack of pointless paper into a real boy.

See also

• The First Men
• Children of the Woods