[Dhanshitha Ravi and Santosh S are third and final year law students respectively at Symbiosis Law School, Pune] The United Kingdom High Court (“UKHC”) on the 12 May 2023 delivered a landmark judgment in the realm of corporate jurisprudence in a first of its kind climate-change based derivative action in ClientEarth v. Shell plc. This action was brought by ClientEarth, a minority shareholder in...
Private Equity Firms and the Liability Puzzle of their Subsidiaries
[Rupam Dubey is a 2nd year B.A.LLB student and Hrithik Merchant a 4th year B.A.LLB student, both at the National Law School of India University Bangalore] The traditional essence of private equity was rooted in the strategy of acquiring companies for the purpose of selling them, while remaining detached from the day-to-day operations of the portfolio company. However, the landscape of modern...
ClientEarth-Shell: English Court Rejects Climate-Focused Shareholder Derivative Suit
[This post was first published in the Oxford Business Law Blog] In a closely watched litigation in the climate change space, ClientEarth, a non-profit environmental law organisation based in the United Kingdom, instituted a shareholder derivative suit against the directors of Shell plc. The claim is based on the allegation that the directors breached their duties under the Companies Act 2006 by...
The Remedy for a Corporate Break-Up: A Framework for Cross-Border Demergers in India
[Ishika Garg is a 4th year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at the NALSAR University of Law] Navigating the legalities associated with cross-border demergers (‘CBDs’) has always been a tricky task. The Indian position on this subject has been especially muddled, with a lack of sufficient clarity from both the legal enactments and judicial forums. A post on this Blog has previously noted how the...
“Private Placement”: Syntactic Interpretation of a Financing Engagement Letter
Recently, the England and Wales High Court (Commercial Court) had the occasion in Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. v. Yes Bank Limited [2023] EWHC 745 (Comm) (31 March 2023) to consider contractual language in capital market transactions. While the contract itself was governed by English law, the ruling has implications on contractual interpretation more generally, in addition to its relevance to...
Unraveling “Materiality” in SEBI’s Consultation Paper: Legal Perspectives and Recommendations
[Shantanu Dhingra is a 3rd year law student at the National Law University Odisha] The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on 20 February 2023 released a consultation paper focused on streamlining disclosures by listed entities, intending to strengthen compliance with the SEBI Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements Regulations, 2015. Central to this post is the notion of...
How Will Courts Decide in Bond Holders versus Central Banks?
[Bhargavi Zaveri Shah a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore and an editor of IndiaCorpLaw Blog and Harsh Vardhan is a management consultant] The Supreme Court is currently hearing an appeal against a Bombay High Court judgement on Yes Bank’s restructuring plan. The question at hand in this appeal is this: whether, as part of Yes Bank’s restructuring...
Taking away the Attorney-Client Privilege: Competition Amendment Bill, 2022
[Shubham Gandhi is a 5th year student at NLU, Jabalpur and Hricha Gandhi is an Advocate at Rajasthan High Court] The concept of Attorney-Client privilege (“ACP’’) has become one of the quintessential principles across all global jurisdictions. It simply enunciates that the communication made by the client to its attorney during the course of employment or any document shared will be inadmissible...
The Singapore Court of Appeal on Arbitrability and the Proper Law of Arbitration Agreements
In its recent judgment Mittal v Westbridge Ventures, the Singapore Court of Appeal has considered a number of important questions of arbitration law concerning the proper law of arbitration agreements and the identification of the law which determines whether a particular dispute is arbitrable. The case is likely to be of particular interest to Indian practitioners because it illustrates why in...
Government AI Procurement in India: Can WEF Guidelines Solve the Latency?
[Jishnu M Nair is a Senior Attorney at IBM] With a score of 63.67, India is at the 32nd position in the Government AI readiness Index 2022, issued by Oxford Insights. The index symbolizes that India is more policy-ready than Brazil and Greece, and less policy-ready than China and Malaysia. Although 32 might not be a desirable rank, for a developing nation to be in the first 25% of the countries...
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