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Ranajit Kumar Banerjee   14 August 2018

Partnership firm

If one of the two partners dies, can the other partner continue the business as proprietor


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 1 Replies

kirti kabra   15 August 2018

if one of the two partners of a firm dies, the firm automatically comes to an end and, thereafter, there is no partnership for a third party to be introduced therein and, therefore, there is no scope for applying cl. (c) of s. 42 to such a situation. It may be that pursuant to the wishes of the directions of the deceased partner the surviving partner may enter into a new partnership with the heir of the deceased partner, but that would constitute a new partnership. In this light s. 31 of the Partnership Act falls in line with s. 42 thereof. That section only recognizes the validity of a contract between the partners to introduce a third party without the consent of all the existing partners: it presupposes the subsistence of a partnership; it does not apply to a partnership of two partners which is dissolved by the death of one of them, for in that event there is no partnership at all for any new partner to be inducted into it without the consent of others.”

Similarly, in Smt. S. Parvathammal v. CIT it was held that in a firm consisting of two partners on account of death of one of the partners, the firm automatically dissolved and observed as follows:

“A partnership normally dissolves on the death of the partner unless there was an agreement in the original partnership deed. Even assuming that there was such an agreement in a partnership consisting of two partners on the death of one of them the partnership automatically comes to an end and there is no partnership which survives and into which a third party can be introduced. Hence on the death of S, the original partnership was dissolved. The subsequent taking in of the assessee as a partner was only as a result of entering into of a new partnership between R and the assessee. Partnership was not a matter of heritable status but purely one of contract.”

You need tp file a fresh registration to register the same firm as proprietership .


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