Appraising Section 14 of the Business Facilitation Act 2023 and its Effect on Banks
The consequence of the amendment is that public companies can no longer appoint a minimum of three (3) independent directors. The new requirement compels public companies to appoint not less than one-third of their board members as independent directors. So, for instance, if an affected public company has 18 members on its board, six (6) of them are required by the amendment to be independent directors. Under the old law, it would have been three (3). The impact of 275 (1) & (2) of CAMA (as amended) is that some public companies may need to replace Non-Executive Directors or Executive Directors on its board with independent directors to maintain the threshold of one-third of the board members provided by the new section 275 of CAMA. Some boards of public companies may lose policy control of their companies.