The situation: a current Meta employee wants to become a minor shareholder (between 5 and 10%) of a private limited company in the UK. Does anyone have the actual experience of requesting the «prior written approval» (or similar), to be fully safe while doing the side business? No contracts, directorship or any other formal even «office/chair holding», just ownership of some shares. No job is gonna be done using the company hardware, insider information or whatever similar «grey stuff». The business is IT but unrelated and no way to compete with FB. #sidejob #startup
In UK, the companies do mention explicitly in employment contract that you need to disclose any investment > 5%. It Is mainly for competing purposes (legally as far I understood). If they don’t explicitly mention, you could invest - even if they do 99% of the cases you can. I had similar clause with large company couple of years ago. I do have an offer from Meta in UK - the contract does NOT has any restriction/disclosure clauses . I do own more than 5% in 4 PL companies in UK as an investor. I was told it is fine. You can still check with HR but don’t stop your due diligence because of it.
we have a few colleagues with significant investments in partner businesses from family business, self-owned apps from app stores and venture capitals. you'll need to follow the process and disclose but this is quite normal (in London). have a series of paid apps in the app store and just needed to get approved by legal & manager.
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I’m sorry for not having knowledge about the UK specifically, but in when I worked in Germany it was specifically stated in my contract that I could not, in any way, have other types of income that would come from outside of my company. I checked it with HR because I invest in the stock market, and they told me that stocks were “obviously” out of the range (as we can do whatever we can with our money). Maybe you can check with your HR about it like I did. If this isn’t gonna bring you any work, they shouldn’t have reason to be against it
Thanks a lot for reply! This might be the case so this is why I asked specifically about Meta (FB) and real experience (HR tickets may take eternity to resolve, I hoped here it could be quicker). It won't bring any work for sure (in terms of working contracts, etc) but (hopefully) will bring some additional income (dividends or some other kind of benefits), apart from just "investing" part (shares raising in price). So ideally I'd like to hear some experience from the people from Meta, maybe even with the full-fledged side business activities experience (being a director), so then I'd be sure for just regular shareholding it'll be no problem