[Guest post by Shashank Prabhakar, who is a lawyer with Finsec Law Advisors] The Finance Bill, 2017, which has been passed by both the houses of Parliament and which was assented to by the President of India on 3 April 2017, has amended certain provisions of the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act, 1992 (“SEBI Act”) and the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, 1956 (“SCRA”). The most...
MCA’s Notification for Enhanced Exemptions Under the Merger Control Regime
[Guest post by Varun Thakur, BA.LL.B fourth year student at National Law University, Jodhpur.] In a notification dated 27 March, 2017, the Central Government, exercising its powers under the Competition Act, 2002 (‘the Act’), has issued a notification containing certain clarifications for easing compliance under the merger control regime. These interpretations are aimed at ensuring the...
Supreme Court on Vicarious Liability of Corporate Officers
[Guest post by Rahul Bajaj, a final year law student at the University of Nagpur and a SpicyIP fellow] The issue of corporate criminal liability has always been a vexed one, raising as it does profound jurisprudential questions that go to the heart of the separate legal status enjoyed by companies. As Professor Varottil noted in his analysis of the Sunil Bharti Mittal judgment on this Blog that...
Debt Restructuring Through Scheme of Arrangement
I have posted a working paper titled “The Scheme of Arrangement as a Debt Restructuring Tool in India: Problems and Prospects” on SSRN, the abstract of which is as follows: The goal of this paper is to analyse the scheme of arrangement as a debt restructuring tool in India and the extent to which it has been utilised. It finds that the scheme has been used sparingly for debt restructuring in...
Can trustees contract out of fiduciary liabilities?
[The following post is contributed by Shreya Rao and Vakasha Sachdev at Rao Law Chambers] Trust law in India has not kept up with the times. The last few years have seen an increase in the incidence of sophisticated trust structures, particularly in the private wealth and fund industries. However, changes to the law governing trusts have substantially been introduced in ad hoc form by tax...
Supreme Court on DRT’s Jurisdiction for Small Debts
[Guest post by Yudhvir Dalal, 5th Year B.A.LL.B. (Hons.), The National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi.] The Supreme Court late last year in State Bank of Patiala v. Mukesh Jain[i] held that under section 17 of the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002 (‘SARFAESI Act’) a Debt Recovery Tribunal (‘DRT’) is entitled...
Hush of the Whistleblower
[Guest post by Malek Shipchandler, who practices law with a firm in Mumbai. Views are personal and do not necessarily represent those of the firm.] The ongoing controversy at one of India’s most celebrated companies, built on high standards of corporate governance, raises some interesting issues for consideration from a whistleblower perspective. It was earlier reported that the Indian...
SAT on Interest Payment Obligations under the SEBI Act
Readers may recall that the securities law were amended in 2013 in order to confer significant enforcement powers on SEBI. This was done initially by the Securities Laws (Amendment) Ordinance, 2013 that was promulgated with effect from 18 July 2013. The Ordinance had to be re-promulgated before the amendments finally took shape by way of the Securities Laws (Amendment) Act, 2014. Among the...
Shareholding Thresholds for Oppression and Class Actions
The Tata-Mistry episode has brought into focus the minimum shareholding threshold required for a minority shareholder to bring an action for oppression and mismanagement under sections 241 to 244 of the Companies Act, 2013. In a piece in Bloomberg Quint titled Minority Shareholder Protection as a Numbers Game, I examine the implications of such shareholding thresholds that operate as a filter...
Announcing the Socio-Legal Review Forum
[Announcement from the Editorial Board of the Socio-Legal Review] The Editorial Board of the Socio-Legal Review is proud to announce the launch of its online companion/blog, the Socio-Legal Review Forum. Since its inception in 2005, SLR has strived to further the discourse on the intersection of law and society. Over the past decade, it has provided both students and scholars...
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