Fuchi / Novatech / NeoNET: JRJ International was never 'picked up' - it was a quiet internal transfer by the primary (and, technically, constant) owner, Richard Villiers, from Fuchi Americas to Novatech. That transfer, when Villiers made Novatech public, allowed Villiers to a) swipe a corporate court member from Fuchi (as one is permanently assigned to JRJ-or-its-parent-corporation) and therefore b) become a AAA megacorp by default. When Novatech pulled the IPO and wound up merging with Erika and Transys Neuronet, the new corporation (NeoNET, literally 'New Novatech-Erika-Transys') became the parent - though you can bet your toes that Villiers remains the overwhelming shareholder of JRJ International.
While the sourcebooks do refer to an arrangement that make JRJ International a subsidiary of Neonet and a personal holding of Richard Villiers, it is the financial equivalent of a 30-tons flying lizard: it can be written in a sourcebook, but it's nonetheless not actually possible without magic. The very definition of subsidiary status requires majority ownership. If Neonet doesn't own a majority of JRJ stock, it's not a subsidiary (and thus it doesn't receive its AAA rating). If JRJ owns a majority of JRJ stock, then Richard Villiers is not "personnally owning it".
What's possible is Villiers having stock options that allow him to take JRJ control back in a snap.
BMW --> Saeder-Krupp, ORO --> Aztechnology, Yamatetsu --> EVO: naming conventions
BMW still appears as a subsidiary of the Saeder-Krupp group. How the group was actually restructured to form Saeder-Krupp is not clear (
Corporate Shadowfiles and
Corporate Guide don't even agree if it happened under Michel Beloit or Lofwyr). Indeed, they would have been silly not to keep the founding prime megacorporation as the head company and rename it.
They could have done it because they intended the company to remain headquartered in Germany. Fuchi or Renraku could not do it because they were Japanese companies who took over respectively an US and a Slovenian company.
Although it doesn't have any significant consequence, this also applies to Yamatetsu/Evo. Evo is Yamatetsu renamed. But Yamatetsu is not Yamatetsu. That is, there is a Yamatetsu company incorporated in Russia who is legally a different company from the Yamatetsu company incorporated in Japan.
I hear you say "They are extraterritorial megacorporation. Where they are headquartered doesn't matter. They are their own country." It actually does (besides, no, they are not countries). Megacorporations can write their own law to apply to their employees and inside their facilities. But shareholders are not employees. They own the megacorporation. A CEO cannot "revoke" shareholders he doesn't like. Damien Knight would have done it a long time ago if he could ; even Aztechnology could not legally remove Oliver McLure from its board. Besides, megacorporation also are shareholders themselves, and they likely don't want their subsidiaries to be able to "secede" from the parent company. The entire megacorporate system relies on ownership rights. Shareholder ownership is established by the laws of the land a corporation was incorporated in. That makes the country megacorporation are headquartered in important.
There are rules so that the extraterritorial privileges granted by the Corporate Court extend to parent companies and subsidiaries. But each of those are distinct legal persons. And the Fuchi/JRJ case shows that those rules nonetheless strictly prevent founding status to be transfered (otherwise, their lawyers would have it done).
So the Corporate Court acknowledges for instance Keruba of Slovenia as one of its founding member, a company incorporated under Slovanian laws. Keruba/Renraku can incorporate "Keruba" companies all over the world and transfer them ownership of the group, only the company in Slovenia (whatever its name may now be) has a founding status.
