Lahore: The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) has issued a draft of the Companies (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020; which proposes amendments to the Companies Act 2017 for implementing the government’s ease-of-doing-business initiative.
Under the Companies (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020, SECP can
implement measures for providing greater ease-of-doing-business, improving
regulatory quality and efficiency and facilitating innovation and the use of
technology in conducting business by the corporate sector. These measures
include efforts to formalise existing practices through regulations and
implementing other measures for attaining international standards of regulatory
quality and efficiency for greater ease of doing business.
The amendment also allow the commission to specify modes and procedures for enabling greater ease of entry into and exit from the market to start-up companies.
It also allows SECP to implement measures for constituting
special task groups from the corporate sector to encourage the use of financial
technology in businesses and creating environments for testing and examining
the impact of innovation, new processes or technologies outside the existing
regulatory framework. These include crowd funding, digital assets, Open APIs,
Smart Contracts, cloud based solutions and allowing the establishment and use
of regulatory sandboxes.
