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 With many wholly owned subsidiary companies merging with their listed holding companies, there were differing views on whether the meetings of the shareholders and the creditors of such listed entities are necessarily required to be conducted or they can be dispensed with. The rationale for this was also in question since the merger was only between wholly owned subsidiaries with their holding companies where there was no dilution in the shareholding of the listed entity nor was there a compromise with the creditors of the holding company. Read More: https://tlegal.com/blog-details/dispensation-of-shareholders-and-creditors-meetings-for-listed-entities-in-amalgamation-proceedings Relevant Provisions Before proceeding to discuss the recent judicial precedents, it is helpful to take a glance at the relevant provisions of the Companies Act, 2013 (“ Act ”). In terms of the Section 230(1) of the Act, for a compromise or arrangement to be fructified, a meeting of creditors or class o

 In July 2022, the Indian Supreme Court (“SC”) pronounced its judgment[1] (“Judgment”) in a batch of writ petitions challenging the various provisions of the statute, namely, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (“PMLA”). This article aims to summarise the history of PMLA, reasons for challenging the said statute, the decision of the SC, and its implications. Read More: https://tlegal.com/blog-details/explainer-or-vijay-madanlal-choudhary-and-others-v-union-of-india-and-others Historical Context The history of the PMLA can be traced back to the later part of the 1980s, when an urgent need was felt among various nations to protect their financial systems from money-laundering. In 1990, the United Nations General Assembly[2] called upon its member nations to develop mechanisms to prevent financial institutions from crumbling due to money-laundering, and to achieve the same by enacting laws in the respective countries. Eventually, in 1998, the United Nations in the ‘Special S

 The term ‘Intermediary’ has been defined in clause (w) of sub-section 1 of section 2 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (“  IT Act ”) as “ any person who on behalf of another person receives, stores or transmits an electronic record or provides any service with respect to that record and includes telecom service providers, network service providers, internet service providers, web-hosting service providers, search engines, online payment sites, online-auction sites, online-market places and cyber cafes ”. This is a very broad definition. This not only covers social media companies (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) but also a wide range of players in the internet ecosystem including search engines (Google Inc., Yahoo Inc.), online payment sites (Paypal, Phonepe), online-market place (Amazon, Flipkart), telecom service providers (Jio, Vi), and cyber-cafes. The definition applies to any company where the user has an identity in the intermediary in form of a unique account/number (though s

 Party autonomy is a foundational pillar in arbitration proceedings. An arbitration agreement reflects the parties’ willingness to be legally bound within the contours of that agreement. That is to say that parties to an arbitration agreement mutually consent to bestow jurisdiction upon a court and/or tribunal to decide certain disputes by their choice of law. However, in recent demanding times, in order to meet the ends of justice, courts and tribunals, under certain exceptional circumstances, have allowed extension of arbitration agreements to bind non-signatories. This article seeks to briefly review such exceptional circumstances under which courts and tribunals have approved joinder of non-signatories as party to the arbitration agreement by invoking the Group of Companies doctrine and the implications drawn by such joinder in absence of consent to be bound by the arbitration agreement. APPLICATION OF THE DOCTRINE IN ARBITRATION PROCEEDINGS In broad terms, the doctrine is of