UK: the Overseas Companies (Company Contracts and Registration of Charges) Regulations 2009 - draft published

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has published a draft of the Overseas Companies (Company Contracts and Registration of Charges) Regulations 2009, available in Word format here. The draft Regulations replace Part 6 and Chapter 5 of Part 9 of the draft Overseas Companies Regulations that were published by BERR on its website in June 2008. Also published is an impact assessment (PDF) and a brief explanatory note (Word) which sets out the differences between these new Regulations and those published in 2008. The note also explains:

The [Companies Act] 2006 Act has a single regime under which an overseas company must be registered at Companies House if it has an establishment in the UK. This is a new concept. The revised draft Regulations provide that the requirement to register charges apply to an overseas company only if it has complied with the requirement to register an establishment (and has not subsequently closed all of its UK establishments). Third parties can discover whether an overseas company has registered an establishment by checking the register at Companies House".