The end of the year marks the fifth anniversary of this Blog. Its first post appeared on December 26, 2007. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the contributors and guests for their thoughtful posts on various areas of corporate and business laws and for fostering a healthy debate and discussion in a manner that is widely disseminated and easily accessible to the interested reader...
Royalty Payments and Corporate Governance
In the past, the corporate governance discourse pertaining to Indian companies has revolved substantially around family owned businesses and government-owned (public sector) companies. Another type of companies that is quite prevalent in the corporate scenario, but usually does not receive specific attention, is Indian listed subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs). A significant...
Companies Bill: From the Rule of Law to the Law of Rules
[The following guest post is contributed by Vinod Kothari and Vrinda Bagaria of Vinod Kothari & Company. These can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected] respectively. In this post, the authors critically analyze the extensive nature of rule making powers conferred upon the Central Government under the Companies Bill, 2011] Introduction Parliament makes legislation...
1st NLS-TIOL Taxation Law Conference
The Moot Court Society of National Law School of India University, Bangalore, in association with Tax India Online, is organising the 1st NLS-TIOL Taxation Law Conference on 6th January, 2013 along with the NLS TIOL Moot Court Competition. The Conference seeks to trace out the developments since the proposed introduction of General Anti-Avoidance Rule in the Finance Act, 2012. While the Shome...
New York Courts’ Long-Arm Jurisdiction
The Harvard Corporate Governance Blog has a post discussing a recent judgment that confers significant long-arm jurisdiction to the New York Courts. Here is the summary: On November 20, 2012, the New York Court of Appeals issued an opinion that is of substantial importance to international banks and financial institutions that maintain and use correspondent banking accounts in New York. In Licci...
A Round Up of a Rollercoaster Year
As 2012 began, several BRICS economies that showed immense promise began to face slower growth. This was also influenced by developments elsewhere (including the crisis in Europe). India was affected by the same phenomenon. The Indian situation was also marred by several policy-related issues that continued to remain for nearly two-thirds of the year. This includes the “policy paralysis” that...
Another SAT Order on Front Running
Last month, Mr. Jayant Thakur had discussed an order of the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) in the case of Dipak Patel where SAT interpreted the SEBI (Prohibition of Fraudulent and Unfair Trade Practices Relating to Securities Markets) Regulations, 2003 (the “PFUTP Regulations”) to mean that front running is not a crime unless it is committed by an “intermediary”. Mr. Thakur’s post points to...
Delaware Ruling on Indian In-house Counsel and Legal Privilege
A couple of years ago, we had discussed the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision in the Akzo Nobel and Ackros Chemicals case where in-house legal counsel was denied legal professional privilege even though such counsel was enrolled as an advocate in the relevant bar at the time. Although that case involved European companies, we had made some guesses as to what might be the position in India...
Willful Defaulters and Derivatives Transactions
The Supreme Court was recently confronted with a question as to whether a company that had entered into a derivatives transaction with a bank could be categorized as a “willful defaulter” under the Reserve Bank of India’s Master Circular on Willful Defaulters on account of non-performance of payment obligations. More specifically, the question was whether a bank could be treated as a “lender” in...
Companies Bill as Approved by the Lok Sabha
The new companies legislation took a major step yesterday by receiving the approval of the Lok Sabha (India’s lower house of Parliament), and it appears to be inching closer to reality. The version of the Bill as approved by the Lok Sabha and a set of corrigenda are available on the website of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (here and here) respectively. Another development is the passage of...
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