[Pammy Jaiswal is a Partner at Vinod Kothari and Company] The activism of institutional investors was experienced for the very first time in Life Insurance Corporation v. Escorts Ltd., 1986 AIR 1370. While the Bombay High Court initially held that the role of the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) is unconstitutional and mala fide, the Supreme Court allowed the LIC’s appeal and specifically stated...
MCA’s Proposals for Overhauling the Audit Industry
In corporate governance parlance, auditors are considered to be key “gatekeepers”. However, governance failures both in India and around the world have pointed fingers towards the role of auditors. This has led to a series of reforms that impose greater stringency on auditors and the audit process. For example, the audit provisions in the Companies Act, 2013 (the “Act”) have been designed...
SEBI’s Deferral of the Chair-CEO Separation
Following the Kotak Committee recommendations, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in May 2018 announced that the top 500 Indian listed companies must mandatorily separate the roles of the chair and CEO (or managing director) to prevent a concentration of power in a company’s leadership structure. Moreover, SEBI stipulated that the chairperson should not be related to the CEO. These...
Reinforcing the Corporate Governance Framework on Director Competence
[Tushar Oberoy and Rishabh Sharma are 4th year BA.LL.B. (Hons.) students at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad] A director of a company has manifold duties and responsibilities that include ensuring that the interests of all shareholders are protected and that healthy management practices are put in place. For effective fulfillment of these responsibilities, a competent director becomes an...
Scope of Appeals against SEBI’s Disposal of Investor Complaints
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has established the “SEBI Complaints Redress System” (SCORES) for receiving investor complaints in respect of listed companies, collective investment schemes and other SEBI-regulated entities. The question of whether an appeal lies from SEBI’s disposal of an investor complaint through SCORES came up for consideration before the Securities...
The Foibles of a Databank and Proficiency Test for Independent Directors
There is no gainsaying that board independence has come to assume a pivotal position in corporate governance. Although it continues to receive constant criticism on account its ineffectiveness, no one musters the courage to banish it or even diminish its importance. While the concept of independent directors only gradually received the required attention and seriousness in India, it has been the...
SEBI Committee on Regulating Proxy Advisors
Over the last decade, India has witnessed considerable shareholder activism in that shareholders, particularly institutions, have become more active in exercising their corporate franchise. Proxy advisory firms have formed an integral part of this movement, as they provide advice to both institutional and individual shareholders on how they may exercise votes at shareholder meetings of companies...
Shareholding Patterns and Director’s Duty of Loyalty: Comparative Analysis of India and the US
[Ishani Mookherjee is a 3rd year B.A. LLB (Hons.) student at Jindal Global Law School] The Delaware Supreme Court, in Cede v. Technicolor Inc., examined the applicability of the business judgment rule in the United States (US). For a business decision to be protected by this rule, two conditions have to be satisfied – the duty of loyalty and the duty of reasonable care. This creates a...
SEBI’s DVRs Framework: How Will the Indian Market React to a Super Voting Stock Structure?
[Sarthak Sharma and Aabha Dixit are 3rd year and 4th year students respectively at Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur] The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on 27 June 2019, after much deliberation, approved the issuance of shares with differential voting rights (DVRs) and issued a framework governing issuance and listing of shares with DVRs. Prior to this, whilst issuance...
Lessons from L&T’s Takeover of Mindtree: Can Differential Voting Rights Aid Promoters in Peril?
[Rongeet Poddar is a final year B.A. LLB (Hons.) student at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences] A hostile takeover is a rare occurrence in the Indian market because of the stringent control of promoter-families over companies and concentrated shareholding patterns in India. L&T’s hostile takeoever of IT services firm Mindtree however is an exception to this general trend...
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