Some essays, some thoughts

The Day ROC Called

One day at our newly set up corporate headquarters at Wisma Hii Yii Ngiik, the group executive directors were busy meeting away with all sorts of difficult decisions to be made. Without notice two men from the Registry Of Companies (ROC) visited. They were looking for the secretary. I am the secretary. I told them. They explained that they were from the ROC office and were doing a random checks on companies. They came to Yung Kong Holdings because it is the holding company.

Fine, which companies would you like to check? I asked. They specified two bigger companies and wanted a big table for their works but unfortunately at that moment no big table was available, so they had to make do with the centre table of our settee. My secretary dealt with them as I continued with our GED meeting. When they were ready, I was summoned. Show me the share certificates! Their first question bewildered me. We have given all the certificates to the shareholders, we dont keep any share certificate which belonged to the shareholders. We looked at each other startled. It never crossed my mind that there were some companies which over looked the duty of issuing share certificates to its shareholders. Only after some quick thinking did I realize that they wanted to be sure that our companies issued share certificates to our shareholders, so I showed they copies of issued certificates with acknowledgement of receipt. They were satisfied with our evidence.

This company changed to a Berhad from a Sendirian Berhad, can you show me the Board resolution? The search took a while as I could not pin point the year of conversion. Again, he was satisfied with our minutes. By this time they had finished checking the statutory registers and the minutes books. They said that they were quite happy with our records. I told them we kept our records as required by the laws, and we kept them neatly and orderly not so much in anticipation of checking by his department, more so to keep up our own high standards. Look at these cabinets, I invited them, these are fire proof cabinets instead of ordinary steel or wooden ones. We know that these are important records and documents and couldnt affort to lose them, so they are kept in these fire cabinets.

Since I was given the port folio of Group Company Secretary and run YKH as the Group Secretariat, I spent much efforts, with the help of my secretary, to put all the records in order. That included buying an expensive minute book called Triset for every company (we used to have only 1 Triset for all the companies!). And with the help of our Auditors, we obtained data from the ROC office to fill in any missing information so as to make our statutory registers complete. It took us few years to eventually straighten up information on all our companies. These of course included many electronic files kept in our central computer.

Should the officer come a few years earlier, our records may not be as complete but for now, it is hard not to keep our records in order when our own expectations are higher than the authorities!

Set a high standard for ourselves and achieve it, we will be ever ready for any challenge.

- Ir Michael Hii, 1996

> ESSAY

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