How to Check UBO and Related-Party Litigation (2026)

ClawScore · UBO and Related Parties

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

The company on the contract is rarely the whole story. Behind it sit the people who really own and control it, the ultimate beneficial owners, and around it sit the related and connected entities through which money and risk actually move. A UBO and related-party litigation check is the exercise of mapping that chain and then searching every part of it for court and tribunal cases, so a problem hidden in a holding company or a promoter's other venture does not surprise you later. This guide explains how to identify the chain in India and how to search it. Last verified October 2026.

01The short answer

To check UBO and related-party litigation, first map the ownership and control chain from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs records: the company, its shareholders, its Significant Beneficial Owners declared under Section 90 of the Companies Act, 2013, its directors, and the related and group entities those people also control. Then search each of those names, companies and individuals alike, across the case systems: eCourts, the High Court and Supreme Court portals, the NCLT and the DRTs.

The point is that a case against the named company may be clean while the real exposure sits in a holding company, a sister concern, or the promoter's personal name. Confirm the exact legal names first, and verify any similar-name hit before relying on it.

02UBO and related party, defined for India

Two ideas sit at the centre of this check:

• Ultimate beneficial owner (UBO). In India the formal version is the Significant Beneficial Owner under Section 90 of the Companies Act, 2013: broadly, the individual who ultimately owns or controls the company, declared to the company and filed with the MCA in the BEN forms. The UBO is the human being behind the corporate layers.
• Related party. Under Section 188 of the Companies Act and the accounting standards, related parties include holding and subsidiary companies, entities under common control, directors and their relatives, and key management. These are the entities through which value and risk move within a group.

For the wider company check these sit inside, see the MCA, GST and litigation company due diligence checklist.

03Step 1: map the chain before you search

You cannot search what you have not identified, so the first job is to draw the chain:

• Start at the company on the MCA at mca.gov.in and pull its shareholding, directors and charges.
• Find the SBO declarations (the BEN filings) to identify the individuals who ultimately own or control it.
• List the related and group entities: holding and subsidiary companies, LLPs, and other companies where the same individuals are directors or shareholders.
• Capture the individuals by name and DIN, because personal guarantees and criminal matters sit on people, not companies.

The output is a clean list of names, companies and people, which becomes the search universe.

04Step 2: search every node

Now run the litigation search across the whole list, not the headline company alone:

For the company-level method see how to find court cases against a company, and for the individuals see how to search cases against a director.

05Why the chain is where risk hides

Groups are structured so that the operating company, the asset-holding company and the borrowing company are often different entities. A litigation check that stops at the name on the contract misses the places risk is actually parked:

• an insolvency petition against the holding company that controls the one you are dealing with;
• a SARFAESI or DRT action against a sister concern that shares the same promoter and the same cash;
• a fraud case against the UBO in their personal name, filed in another state.

A clean search on the counterparty is worth little if the holding company is in insolvency and the promoter is facing a fraud case. The risk lives in the chain, so the search has to follow it.

06What a clean result actually means

A clean result here means no matter was found against the names in your chain, in the registries you searched, on the date you searched. It is only as good as the chain you mapped: if you missed an SBO, a sister concern or a former name, you missed its cases too. It also does not rule out a forum you did not reach, an undigitised record, or a matter filed later.

Treat a similar-name hit as something to verify against the DIN, the shareholding or an address before you count it. Record the chain you mapped and the forums you covered, and re-check before a major decision. This is research to inform a decision, not legal advice.

07Where Claw fits

Claw is an all-in-one legaltech platform for Indian advocates, law firms, and corporate legal teams, combining AI-based case search, an AI legal assistant (Legal GPT), case management, and compliance automation across all Indian courts and tribunals.

ClawScore, at clawscore.clawlaw.in, is Claw's litigation and criminal-risk service, and its design fits the chain problem directly. You give it a company or a person and it searches every matter across 9,102 courts, benches and forums and returns one scored Excel workbook: a Summary tab with a ClawScore risk band (Clean, Low, Moderate or High), a Matters tab, a Related parties tab that pulls in directors, guarantors and group entities so the chain comes out in one place, and a Coverage tab recording what was searched. Every finding carries a MATCH CONFIDENCE, so a similar name in a large group is flagged for you to verify rather than assumed. Its Constant Monitoring runs daily, weekly or monthly scans on a watched list of the whole chain and reports what is New, Changed or Closed. It draws on 30 crore+ judgments, with Supreme Court decisions from 1950 and High Court decisions from 1990, and returns results in under 5 seconds. Claw does not train its AI models on your documents. You still confirm the ownership chain itself on the MCA.

Create a FREE Claw account to check a counterparty and its related parties and set up monitoring, and use case search across Indian courts to surface matters across the company, its owners and its group.

08Sources and further reading

• Ministry of Corporate Affairs (shareholding, SBO and director records): mca.gov.in
• India Code (Companies Act, 2013, bare text): indiacode.nic.in
• eCourts Services (district and subordinate courts): services.ecourts.gov.in
• National Judicial Data Grid (pendency data): njdg.ecourts.gov.in
• Claw: clawlaw.in

Government portals are the authoritative record. This guide is general information, not legal advice; confirm the ownership chain on the MCA and match any case to the right entity before acting.

09Frequently asked questions