Old shelf companies
Because of the business we’re in, we tend to register more companies in our group than we actually need.
So, when we ran short of older shelf companies, I dug around and found a 1996 Close Corporation that we had formed, never used and allowed to be deregistered.
It’s now possible to reinstate companies that were not trading at the time of deregistration, so we reinstated the old CC, paid R3 500 CIPC penalty fees to complete the 14 outstanding Annual Returns and we then had an antique on the shelf.
We renamed it “In Business Since 1996”
It sold within three weeks. So now our oldest is 2015.
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Thanks for this interesting article. Did CIPC rules changed? All that I could ever find, is that it can be only be re-instated if you can provide evidence that it has been trading at the time of deregistration or owns immovable property.
Does CIPC now allow re-instatement even if the entity was not trading at the time of deregistration?
Hi karen,
The rules changed in February 2025 making it no longer a requirement that the company was trading at the time of deregistration. However, CIPC still say that it is a requirement all over the place because they haven’t done a good cleanup job.
There’s another problem though. These reinstatements were done via email from February up to about a week ago. Then they switched to online and when I tried one it simply didn’t work. I haven’t retried, but I guess they’ll sort it out.