In the light of the decision of the Constitution Bench in BALCO, an Indian court has no jurisdiction to set aside a foreign arbitral award under section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, unless the arbitration agreement was made before 06.09.2012. One consequence of this is that a foreign arbitral award is likely to be scrutinised by the Indian courts only if the successful...
Moot Court Problems on Indian Corporate Law
I have uploaded on SSRN “A Collection of Moot Court Problems on Corporate Law in India”. This contains (to begin with) 12 moot court problems that I have worked on (either individually or jointly with others) over the last 8 years or so. More background and details are contained in the preface to the document, which is set out below: Moot court competitions form an important co-curricular...
Amendments to SEBI’s FUTP Regulations Effective
In previous posts (here, here and here), we had discussed issues that had arisen under the SEBI (Prohibition of Fraudulent and Unfair Trade Practices Relating to the Securities Market) Regulations, 2003 (the FUTP Regulations), particularly in the context of front running. We had also discussed SEBI’s proposal to amend the FUTP Regulations to expand the scope of front running and also to bring in...
Update on Delisting of Fresenius Kabi Oncology Limited
[The following post is contributed by Yogesh Chande, who is a Consultant with Economic Laws Practice, Advocates & Solicitors. Views of the author are personal] On 22 July 2013, the SEBI whole time member passed an order in relation to the proposed voluntary delisting of Fresenius Kabi Oncology Limited (Target Company) by its promoters in accordance with the SEBI (Delisting of Equity Shares)...
FDI and Acquisition of Shares on the Stock Exchange
Under the prevailing regime on foreign direct investment (FDI) in India, only certain types of investors are entitled to buy and sell shares on the stock exchange through a registered broker. They are foreign institutional investors (FIIs), qualified foreign investors (QFIs) and non-resident Indians (NRIs). All other types of non-resident investors may either buy shares from the company in a new...
Draft Rules under the Companies Act; CSR
The Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India (MCA) has published a set of draft rules required to make the Companies Act, 2013 operational. This first set has been posted on the MCA website. Comments are due on October 8, 2013. This post briefly considers the draft Corporate Social Responsibility Rules issued under section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013. In a previous post, we had set...
Analysis of the Companies Act, 2013
In due course, we propose to analyze various provisions of the Companies Act, 2013. In this behalf, Mihir has recently commented upon the class action mechanism stipulated in the legislation. As for previous analyses of the provisions (as they were contained in the Companies Bill, 2011), please see the following earlier posts on the Blog: 1. ...
Class Actions in the Companies Act, 2013: a Recipe for Confusion?
The Companies Act, 2013 introduces some important changes to the company law regime in India. In this post, we shall discuss one such new feature: the class action. The provisions governing class actions are introduced through s. 245 of the Act. These provisions are included under ‘Chapter XVI – Prevention of Oppression and Mismanagement’: however, class actions are evidently not the same as...
SAT now holds front running to be an offence
The Securities Appellate Tribunal (“SAT”) has now held that front running is indeed a fraudulent and manipulative act in violation of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Prohibition of Fraudulent and Unfair Trade Practices Relating to Securities Market) Regulations, 2003 (“PFUTP Regulations”). It has departed from its earlier decisions in case of Dipak Patel (discussed here) and Sujit...
RBI Clarification on Overseas Investment Norms
In a previous post, Satyajit had discussed the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) policy measures announced on August 14, 2013 to restrict overseas direct investments (ODI). Primarily, it was decided to reduce the ODI limits of a company from 400% of its net worth to 100%. Yesterday, the RBI announced some clarifications that mitigate the severity of the above restrictions. First, it clarified that...
Recent Comments