Shekh & Co. LLP, a Company Secretaries firm provides various secretarial and related consulting services. Arun has recently started a private equity fund and was looking for targets for investment. Arun requested She

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) website provides many information relating to the company. Some information are available without payment of fees like Name of the Company, CIN, Authorised and paid up capital, Name and address of the Directors etc. The website also provides for the viewing of document by public on payment of requisite fee. Public documents include the following: Incorporation documents Certificates, including Incorporation certificate and Charge creation, modification and satisfaction certificates Charge documents Annual Returns and Balance Sheet Change in directors and other e-forms MCA website offers the facility to view documents and also search and other facilities of public documents. This facility is handy for users and banks and financial institutions while sanctioning loans. This facility enables viewing of public documents of companies for which payment has been made by user. The document can be accessed at any time within 7 days after the payment has been confirmed. However, once the user has started viewing the first document of the company after the payment, the access to the documents will be available for only 3 hours, unless the documents are downloaded within those 3 hours. Documents once downloaded and saved by the user on his computer/cloud will be permanently available for future access. User has to access My MCA portal (www.mca.gov.in) and register to the portal by creating a User ID and password login to the MCA portal through the link available on the home page. After logging in, click on the 'MCA Services" ' tab and in the drop down menu on it, click the "View Public Documents" button appearing under the "Document Related Services" segment. On the next page fill the necessary details of your company (for which the search is to be made) and proceed to make the payment for the online search. Once the Payment is made, go to "My Services" Tab. On this page, at the bottom, under the heading "Documents", the List of company names will be displayed, for which user have already paid for public viewing. It also displays Date of request i.e., the date, when user made the request to view the company document and the expiry date & time upto which the access is available to the user for the documents. Status of the request i.e., whether viewed or to view. Click on the view link under status field. The documents are grouped under five categories i.e., user has to click on the desired category under which the document falls. If more than one document is listed, the user can arrange them name wise or date wise. On clicking the document name, the document shall be displayed for viewing. The User can save the document on his computer hard drive/ cloud for future use. The public documents under this facility are available for viewing by public on payment of requisite fee.