Companies Act 2006: Takeovers and electronic communications – update

On 18 December the Minister for Industry and the Regions, Margaret Hodge, made a statement in Parliament setting out when certain provisions of the Companies Act 2006 will be brought into force. As expected, those that relate to the implementation of the Transparency Directive, including provisions to facilitate electronic communications between companies and their shareholders, will be brought into force on 20 January 2007.

Part 28 of the new Act, which implements the Takeovers Directive on a permanent basis, and makes various other changes to the statutory squeeze-out procedure, will be brought into force on 6 April 2007.

Earlier this month the new Act was published, several weeks after it received Royal Assent. After the draft Bill was published in July, at the end of the House of Commons stage, various amendments were made to the electronic communications provisions, some of which were not announced or reported. We have therefore revised our article on 'Takeovers and electronic communications' that was published in November, before the Act appeared, to take account of these amendments. No substantive amendments were made to the takeovers provisions, so this part of our original article has not been changed.

For the updated version of our article on Takeovers and Electronic Communications please click here.

If you have any problems opening or printing the pdf file above, please click here for help.

The Companies Act 2006 can be found by clicking here.