Karnataka accounts for more than 11% of deregistered companies

Karnataka, which has the sixth largest concentration of the registered companies across the country, has seen de-registration of 11,287 companies, a little over 11% of the one lakh de-registered companies across the country, owing to their prolonged dormancy.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Saturday, said the fate of one lakh companies has been locked with one stroke of a pen in one minute due to irregularities. The Registrar of Companies (RoC) has removed these one lakh companies.

Though Modi, at that time did not specify the irregularities but added that another two lakh companies are under the lens for involvement in what looks like dubious transactions post-demonetisation.

The state had 1,04,337 companies registered with the RoC, as on Sunday. The list, that includes the de-registered companies as well, will be reduced to 93,050, once the names of the de-registered companies are struck off from the list.

Karnataka falls under the jurisdiction of RoC Bangalore. While RoCs of Delhi, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu lead in the number of registered companies, RoC Hyderabad is marginally ahead of Karnataka.

But RoC Hyderabad has jurisdiction spanning in both bifurcated states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The list mostly contains the companies which have been inactive from past two years. “There is a legal provision that once the company is inactive for more than two years, it needs to be de-registered. These de-registrations have taken place earlier as well, but not on such a huge scale,” M Jayakumar, RoC Bangalore told DH.

He also said that such actions will be taken in future as well. “There is a suspicion that these companies are involved in money laundering activity. But it is just a suspicion and it is not the reason behind striking off their names,” he added.

Though the fine print of the list is yet to be made public, but the sources told DH that Maharashtra might see the highest delisting of the companies.