REGULATORY & COMPLIANCE PRACTICE
ALO’s corporate experience and depth of resource permits it to comprehensively advice its clients on the entire spectrum of regulatory and compliance specific issues facing them. Its corporate compliance service extends to advice and review of generic corporate compliance, securities regulations compliance, exchange control compliance, revenue compliance, anti-trust regime compliance, supervening industry regulation compliance, industrial human resource regulation compliance, domestic, municipal and local law compliance and environmental law compliance.
As a continuous comfort program, ALO offers regular compliance review and certification through a seamless streamlined procedure that minimizes cost, rapidly identifies areas of concern and then proceeds to quickly address those concerns. ALO’s extensive experience of the corporate environment gives it a mature perspective on governance issues facing Indian corporations. ALO advises companies on hard-core governance issues, on associated compliance issues, and on downstream company secretarial issues.
As an external law firm review and comfort program, ALO clients regularly employ our Corporate Governance Audits to secure directors and exclude potential liability. ALO advises on matters placed before a Board of Directors and manages all private or public shareholders’ concerns: share transfers, convening of meetings of shareholders, preparation of minutes, corporate compliance and strategic sensitivities.
In furtherance of this practice area, ALO has prepared comprehensive Statutory Compliance Manuals to be used as reference guides for constructively adhering to the Indian compliance environment. The process ALO employs for preparing compliance manuals involves undertaking extensive audit under stringent confidential obligations, identifying issues and areas of default, and thereafter providing practical and implementable solutions in the form of operating manual. ALO clients’ find value in the approach and use such manuals as ready and practical reference points. ALO at all times is conscious of its clients’ business perspective and in submitting solutions in its operating manuals, it ensures the measures and steps it proposes include solutions specific to businesses and thereby retaining relevance.
In its’ role as legal advisers, ALO is aware of the changing legal and compliance environment and clients’ altering business needs and engages in updating its compliance advice through periodic update flashes and awareness programmes for its clients’.
We set out an illustrative list of our services below:
- Pre-acquisition legal due diligence in all M&A transactions in which the firm has participated complete with comprehensive reports that the acquirer can then use as a definitive data base to further manage its acquisition. During this process, ALO has also provided an early warning tool with which its clients can proactively prevent potential liability. In the last decade, the numbers of due diligences done by the firm numbers in the dozens.
- Operating company statutory compliance of both Central and State statutes culminating in a comprehensive report that may then be tabled to the Board of Directors. Such a report would include a list of corrective measures. ALO has produced tens of reports in the last decade for a range of domestically and foreign owned companies.
- Preparation of compliance procedures and manuals for its clients on an assignment basis. ALO has reviewed the total compliance landscape of its client, examined the potential liability points, reviewed the organizational structure with its associated reporting tree, and thereafter prepared an operating manual by which the company can better secure a compliant corporate environment. The firm’s clients have profited from this one-time activity and several such manuals prepared over the years are still in use.
- Environmental Health and Safety compliance reports pertaining to projects in the construction phase. This service would examine the state of the project’s compliance within the local and global context, advise on the status of approvals, recommended next steps and proactive strategies and identify potential defaults before they occur. ALO has regularly applied this tool in its infrastructure practice.
- Compliance certification prior to issue of equity and debt securities. ALO has issued compliance certifications and advised on offer documents in relation to domestic issues of equity, domestic and overseas issue of debt instruments, GDRs and ADRs.
- Indirect Tax compliance for manufacturing companies with multiple product lines, locations, channels of sale and points of sale. As part of this task, ALO comprehensively reviews the company’s Indian operations, processes, functions and location activities and prepares a compliance checklist and manual to secure long term tax compliance.
- Forensic due diligences in cases where employee or competitor driven extraordinary business practices are suspect including but not limited to illegal gratification, inappropriate business methods, tax frauds and so forth. During such an exercise, ALO drills deep into the data and documentary bank of the client and reconstructs events in detail, thus unearthing the commercial basis of the extraordinary practice, its principal proponents and its actual or intended beneficiaries. ALO also advises on the potential liability flowing from such practices, recommends a course of action to contain this liability and implements such damage control measures as are directed by management.
- Legal Compliance Outsourcing service for its clients in manufacturing and services sector. In this service, ALO takes over the statutory compliance function of the client including the maintenance of statutory register and the responsibility to make statutory filings and fees. ALO has performed this service for a variety of overseas clients over many years.