A growing number of investors no longer seeks mainly to earn money by running businesses, but by making transactions on property rights of companies. The purchase and resale of industrial and commercial establishments are moments where large sums of money are exchanged quickly and in which fortunes are made ​​and unmade. What are the consequences of these changes in ownership on the constant long-term development of the institutions concerned and prosperity (or decline) of their stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, small investors and local) ? We propose here to examine these issues from the case study of European investment in the Brazilian bioethanol.

While one wonders about the business of the twenty-first century and "the company post-crisis", it is useful to return to the original company of the twentieth century. Under what conditions it is born? What explains the forms that we know? And what are the foundations that could now be challenged? Berle and Means provide a historical interest, since their book The Modern Corporation and Private porperty (1932) analyzes the emergence of modern business in the early the twentieth century.