RUN approval is valid for 20 days. Every CS firm knows this. What catches even experienced practitioners off guard is how little margin that leaves once you factor in the time to get a foreign parent's board resolution, MoA, director passports, and POA correctly apostilled from overseas — and delivered to India.
The power of attorney authorising your firm to file must name the specific CS handling the matter. If the CS assignment changes after the POA is apostilled from the foreign country — and it often does in busy firms — the document is invalid. A new POA has to be obtained, notarised, and apostilled from scratch.
Each proposed director who is a foreign national needs their passport and address proof individually notarised and apostilled. There are no shortcuts for multiple directors, and the documents for each must be internally consistent in naming and date.
The US or Singapore parent company sends documents their lawyer notarised. Their lawyer is excellent at US or Singapore law. They may not know that India requires a specific apostille sequence — and that the document format for MCA differs from what SEBI or an Indian bank accepts. Different regulators have different requirements for the same document.
Delaware companies must use the Delaware Secretary of State apostille. California companies must use California's. The US federal government does not apostille corporate documents. This is the single most common error for US parent entities.
In the UK, a solicitor's signature is not the same as a notarial certificate for apostille purposes. The UK's FCDO will issue an apostille only on documents with a proper notarial certificate. Many UK companies use their in-house solicitor and assume that's sufficient. It's not.
UAE is not a Hague Convention member. Documents require: (1) local notarisation, (2) MOFA attestation, (3) Indian Embassy stamp. Each step is a separate appointment, fee, and wait. Most companies discover this only after attempting a direct apostille route that doesn't exist.
Gunjan Sandu, CS, LLB — COO, GetNotary.in
Practicing CS. She reads the RoC's current filing requirements directly and coordinates with your team to make sure the document format matches exactly what MCA's system will accept.
"We had 8 days left on the name reservation when the foreign client's documents came back incorrectly apostilled. GetNotary turned around the correct set in 6 days. We filed on day 7."
That's the only number we need to tell you whether we can deliver in time. Everything else follows from that.
