The owners of the corporation are materially damaged when the corporation gets sued or fined. That happens because that pile of contracts is essentially the steward of their money. However, the corporation itself doesn't take actions. It's just a pile of contracts. Managers take actions.
I do agree that corporate managers have a weird form of liability shield for their bad actions, though. However, if you dig into why this happens, it's often because of things like plausible deniability and diffusion of responsibility, which you don't need a corporation to create (see the way the mob operates).
unfortunately, what these corpos have learned that the best way to avoid and minimize consequences is to ensure a long and drawn out process they can manipulate with lobbiests and sheer outlasting private interests.
