General partnerships

This overview is a guide to the content within the General Partnerships subtopic, with links to the appropriate materials.

The Partnership Act 1890 (PA 1890) sets out the legal framework that applies to general partnerships.

A partnership under the PA 1890 is described as the relationship that subsists between persons (which includes individuals or corporate entities) carrying on a business (which includes every trade, occupation and profession) in common with a view of profit.

Nature of a general partnership and its legal framework

The PA 1890 does not provide a complete code of partnership law and expressly preserves the rules of equity and common law applicable to partnerships.

As a partnership is not a separate legal entity from its partners it cannot acquire rights, incur obligations or hold property in its own right. It is therefore important to distinguish between partnership property and property that personally belongs to an individual partner.

Each partner is an agent of the partnership and their other partners for the purposes of the partnership's business and can bind the partnership, and the other partners, by any action they take in the ordinary

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