Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

Where a court has declared that certain material is derived from something done without the authority of the company, or from something which is forged, I fully take the point that it is unlikely to be in the public interest that it should remain on the register. I would be surprised if the court did not start from a similar point of view when carrying out the ““balance of harm”” test set out in subsection (3), that is, when the court decides whether the harm to the company of maintaining the material on the register is outweighed by any benefit to any other person of it remaining there. I suspect in the great majority of cases the court will conclude that the right thing is for the material to be removed. But the fact remains that, in this clause, we are by definition talking about information whose registration has had legal consequences. The registration may have been picked up by third parties, who will in some way have acted on it. The interests of those third parties should therefore at least be considered in determining what should be done. It is not inconceivable that it would be better for the information to remain, perhaps with an appropriate annotation of warning, than it simply being deleted. I do not say that this will necessarily be common, but it is a possibility in some circumstances. I therefore think it is right that the court should be required to balance any third party interest against that of the company before deciding what the appropriate course of action is in any given case. I stress my earlier point that it is quite possible in the sort of circumstances that the noble Lord has instanced that the court would start from the same point of view that he has.