Unfinished agenda: Govt to introduce bill to decriminalise company law

The proposal to make violation of the requirements under Section 8 punishable only with fines is also being widely debated

The government is in the process of introducing in Parliament a new Bill to further decriminalise the Companies Act, 2013. Through a similar exercise in 2018, 16 non-compliances in the Act were changed from criminal offences to civil.

The new Bill will be largely based on the recommendations of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs-constituted Companies Law Committee (CLC) that submitted its recommendations last month. The recommendations made in the report include categorising offences to fit in the in-house adjudication framework, increasing threshold for CSR compliances, adding exceptions to the definition of listed companies, and giving exemptions to non-banking financial companies. The