Last month the Coalition introduced the
Corporations Amendment (Crowd-sourced Funding) Bill 2016 to
Parliament. This long-awaited piece of crowd-source funding
('CSF') legislation is based upon the somewhat
controversial
2015 Bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives in
February this year but later quietly lapsed at the dissolution of
Parliament before the July election.
The Government's aim is to establish a regulatory framework
for CSF which will allow businesses to obtain funding from a large
number of individual investors through an online platform.
One of the main criticisms of the 2015 Bill was that companies
were only eligible to use the scheme if they had less than $5
million in gross assets and less than $5 million in consolidated
annual revenue. The most significant change made under this new
2016 Bill is that this maximum limit on assets and annual turnover
has been increased from $5 million to $25 million, allowing more
businesses in the
