5.1 MEMORANDUM OF INCORPORATION
Owing to the fact that the New Companies Act 2008 is quite complicated and took practitioners a long time to understand all the ins and outs and especially in regard to the standard form MOI’s provided by the CIPC most practitioners started the process of changing the MOI for their clients very late. In fact, even today amazingly, there are many companies without new company act MOI’s.
It was not necessary for us to have all the MOI’s in place by the 1st May 2013 (the act gave a transitional period of two years) despite the persistent rumours that we had to. Many secretarial practices and legal firms used the fear factor approach to force this change. I think that it was wrong to foister new MOI’s onto clients without going through the details of the MOI so that the clients actually understand it. If we do not understand it ourselves how are we going to get our clients to understand it? I think this is a huge risk area in regard to providing clients with a MOI.