The petitioners herein, in the petition filed under section 248/250 of the Companies Act, 1956 in the matter of Blossom Breweries Ltd., have sought that the CLB should direct the respondents herein to furnish various details regarding shares in the company. When the matter was taken up for hearing, Shri Sarkar appearing for the respondents raised the following preliminary objections with the prayer that order on the preliminary objections be issued before proceeding with the merits of the case. The objections raised by him are:

(1)No petition can be filed under section 248 inasmuch as this section deals with 'suo motu' powers of the CLB in a proceeding before it.

(2)Likewise, no petition can lie under section 250(1) inasmuch as this section deals only with interim relief and not final relief.

(3)No order can be passed against the company under section 248.

(4)Since section 248 deals with an alternate action to that of section 247, the conditions specified in that section should be satisfied before any order is passed under section 248.

(5)Since the petitioners have already withdrawn the petition under section 247/250 filed by them earlier, and since no independent petition lies under section 248, this petition cannot proceed under section 250 which has already been withdrawn along with section 247.

(6)Since the prayer is for seeking details of shares, all the shareholders whose shares are being sought to be brought under the purview, should have been made as parties and the petition thus suffering from non-joinder of parties, cannot be proceeded with.

(7)Since the proceedings under these sections are not adversorial proceedings, the CLB cannot collect evidence for the benefit of the petitioners under section 248.

(8)Finally, since no final order is possible after collection of informa- tion under section 248, no petition can lie under section 248/250.

2. Dealing with these objections, Shri Sarkar pointed out that, even though the CLB has held, in an earlier proceeding, (Assam Brook's case), that an independent petition can lie under section 250(1) of the Act, this decision does not seem to be correct and as such, cannot be relied on in these proceedings. To substantiate his point, he submitted that before 1991, proceedings under section 247/248 were the main proceedings and section 250 was only subsidiary in nature. For invoking the powers under section 247/248, some other proceedings like proceedings under section 397/398 of the Act or other proceedings like section 250(3) or (4) should be before the CLB so that, to give reliefs in those proceedings, the powers under section 250(2) could be invoked since the relief under section 250(2) are of interim nature. Therefore, he submitted that by making a petition under section 250(1), no proceedings can deem to start for invoking the powers under section 247 or 248. He further stated that since these proceedings are not adversorial in nature, even if the CLB collects the information as provided under section 248, the same cannot be made available to the petitioners to enable them to start collateral proceeding. Now that the petitioners have withdrawn the petition under section 247 and since either section 250(1) or 248 does not provide for grant of any relief to the petitioners as such, there is no purpose in collecting the information as sought for in the petition. According to him, this itself would substantiate his stand that unless otherwise there are certain main proceedings, powers under section 248 cannot be invoked. Pointing out to the wordings of section 250 that 'There is good reason to find out the relevant facts about any shares and the CLB is of the opinion that such facts cannot be found out. . . .', he submitted that the prima facie view formed by the CLB cannot be the basis for passing any final order, which according to him, is also not provided for in that section. To strengthen his arguments on the preliminary issue, he submitted that, in the absence of any qualific