REAL PARTY IN INTEREST: THE CORPORATION AND ITS STOCKHOLDERS

The personality of a corporation is distinct and separate from the personalities of its stockholders. Hence, its stockholders are not themselves the real parties in interest to claim and recover compensation for the damages arising from the wrongful attachment of its assets. Only the corporation is the real party in interest for that purpose.xxx

xxx There is no dispute that the properties subject to the levy on attachment belonged to Arc Cuisine, Inc. alone, not to the Cuencas and Tayactac in their own right. They were only stockholders of Arc Cuisine, Inc., which had a personality distinct and separate from that of any or all of them. The damages occasioned to the properties by the levy on attachment, wrongful or not, prejudiced Arc Cuisine, Inc., not them. As such, only Arc Cuisine, Inc. had the right under the substantive law to claim and recover such damages. This right could not also be asserted by the Cuencas and Tayactac unless they did so in the name of the corporation itself. But that did not happen herein, because Arc Cuisine, Inc. was not even joined in the action either as an original party or as an intervenor. The Cuencas and Tayactac were clearly not vested with any direct interest in the personal properties coming under the levy on attachment by virtue alone of their being stockholders in Arc Cuisine, Inc. Their stockholdings represented only their proportionate or aliquot interest in the properties of the corporation, but did not vest in them any legal right or title to any specific properties of the corporation. Without doubt, Arc Cuisine, Inc. remained the owner as a distinct legal person.

Given the separate and distinct legal personality of Arc Cuisine, Inc., the Cuencas and Tayactac lacked the legal personality to claim the damages sustained from the levy of the former’s properties. According to Asset Privatization Trust v. Court of Appeals, even when the foreclosure on the assets of the corporation was wrongful and done in bad faith the stockholders had no standing to recover for themselves moral damages; otherwise, they would be appropriating and distributing part of the corporation’s assets prior to the dissolution of the corporation and the liquidation of its debts and liabilities.xxx (StrongholdInsurance Company, Inc. Vs.Tomas Cuenca, et al., G.R. No. 173297. March 6, 2013)