COMMON ORDER

The prayer made in these writ petitions is to issue a Certiorarified Mandamus, calling for the records of the respective respondents in so far as it relates to the publication of the list of disqualified Directors in which the names of the respective petitioners are included and the consequential deactivation of their Director Identification Number (DIN).

2. According to the petitioners, the respondents herein released a list of disqualified directors under Section 164(2)(a) of the Companies Act, 2013, disqualifying them as directors of the various companies, in which, names of the petitioners were also included. In other words, the respondents, disqualified the petitioners as Directors for non-filing of financial statements or annual returns for continuous period of three financial years by the defaulting companies on whose board, the petitioner (s) is/are serving as a Director. According to the petitioners, by virtue of such disqualification, they could not be appointed or reappointed as director in any other company for a period of 5 years.

Therefore, assailing the orders of disqualification mainly on the ground that such orders have been passed in gross violation of principles of natural justice, the present writ petitions are filed.

3. Today, when the writ petitions are taken up for consideration, the learned counsel appearing for the petitioners jointly submitted that the issue involved herein is no longer res integra. Earlier, this Court by order dated 03.08.2018 in WP. No. 25455 of 2017 etc. batch, in Bhagavan Das Dhananjaya Das case reported in (2018) 6 MLJ 704, allowed those writ petitions and set aside the orders dated 08.09.2017, 01.11.2017, 17.12.2018, etc. passed by the Registrar of Companies, disqualifying the petitioners therein to hold the office of directorship of the companies under Section 164(2)(a) of the Companies Act, which came into effect from 01.04.2014. Thereafter, yet another set of disqualified directors approached this court by filing WP.No.13616 of 2018 etc. batch (Khushru Dorab Madan v. Union of India) which were dismissed by order dated 27.01.2020. The said order of the learned single judge was challenged by some of the petitioners therein before the Division Bench of this Court in W.A. No. 569 of 2020, etc. batch (Meethelaveetil Kaitheri Muralidharan v. Union of India, 2020 SCC OnLine Mad 2958 : (2020) 6 CTC 113), which after elaborately dealt with the issue as to whether the Registrar of Companies is entitled to deactivate the Director Identification Number (DIN), allowed those writ appeals on

09.10.2020, the relevant passage of which, are profitably, extracted below:

"41. As is evident from the above, Rules 9 and 10 deals with the application for allotment of DIN. Rule 10(6) specifies that the DIN is valid for the life time of the applicant and shall not be allotted to any other person. Rule 11 provides for the cancellation or surrender or deactivation of the DIN. It is very clear upon examining Rule 11 that neither cancellation nor deactivation is provided for upon disqualification under Section 164(2) of CA 2013. In this connection, it is also pertinent to refer to Section 167(1) of CA 2013 which provides for vacating the office of director by a director of a Defaulting Company. As a corollary, it follows that if a person is a director of five companies, which may be referred to as companies A to E, if the default is committed by company A by not filing financial statements or annual returns, the said director of company A would incur disqualification and would vacate office as director of companies B to E. However, the said person would not vacate office as director of company A. If such person does not vacate office and continues to be a director of company A, it is necessary that such person continues to retain the DIN. In this connection, it is also pertinent to point out that it is not possible to file either the financial statements or the annual returns without a DIN. Conse