Company Law Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. A73A:"Page 269, leave out lines 43 and 44." The noble Lord said: In moving this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. A73D and A90A, concerned with Clause 562—about the reduction of capital, on which we have been for some time—Clause 563, headed ““Registration of court order””, and Clause 581, headed ““Notice to registrar of redenomination””. In Amendment No. A73A, we seek to leave out new Section 135C(2)(c)(i) on page 269 of the Bill. There seems to be no reason why prescribed particulars as to the rights attached to each class of shares should be sent to the registrar at each of these notification stages. It seems unnecessarily burdensome for this to be required repeatedly. Surely the nominal value and number should be enough. These amendments would therefore be deregulatory and remove the requirements for such onerous filings. On a related issue, we question the value of paragraphs (a) and (b) of new Section 135C(2), in the light of information required by paragraph (c), to which our amendment relates. Why require the company to file the total number of shares and aggregate value of those shares, as well as splitting those shares up into classes, stating how many in each class and the value of each share class? This is simply repeating information and therefore wasting the company’s resources in more form-filling. I accept that we have not tabled an amendment on this, but I hope that the Minister will be able to deal with the general point when he replies to the deregulatory thrust of our Amendment No. A73A. I beg to move.