The Corporate Affairs Ministry (MCA) has extended by one more year the tenure of the existing Company Law Committee (CLC) that was set up in September 2019 to promote Ease of Living in the country by providing Ease of Doing Business to law abiding corporates and fostering improved corporate compliance for stakeholders at large.
The tenure of the existing CLC has now been extended by one more year up to September 16, 2023, official sources said. Earlier, the CLC got tenure extensions in September 2020, September 2021 and now September 2022.
It may be recalled that MCA had on September 18, 2019, set up the 11-member CLC under the Chairmanship of the MCA Secretary for making recommendations to the government on various provisions and issues pertaining to the implementation of the Companies Act 2013 and the Limited Liability Partnership Act 2008.
This panel included T K Vishwanathan, Ex-Secretary General, Lok Sabha; Uday Kotak, Managing Director & CEO, Kotak Mahindra Bank; Siddarth Birla, Chairman, Xpro India Limited and Past Presidents of ICAI Amarjit Chopra and G Ramaswamy besides leading lawyers Shardul S Shroff, Executive Chairman, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co and Ajay Bahl, Founder and Managing Partner, AZB & Partners.
In the recent years, the CLC had worked towards decriminalising the Companies Act 2013 and Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs) Act with a view to ensure Ease of Doing Business.
Over the last few years, the Government has been focusing on improving the Ease of Doing business in the country and even taken steps to amend the company law to re-categorise certain offences under the company law into ‘civil wrongs’ and de-clog the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT).
The CLC set up in 2019 was also tasked to propose measures to further declog and improve the functioning of the NCLT. It was also asked to suggest measures for removing any bottlenecks in the overall functioning of the statutory bodies like SFIO, IEPFA and NFRA.