[Aarohi Chaudhuri is a second-year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore] Anti-arbitration injunctions refer to injunctions granted by civil courts to stay the initiation or continuance of arbitration proceedings. Traditionally, Indian courts have laid down conflicting jurisprudence on civil courts’ powers to intervene in an arbitration by granting...
Karnataka High Court Decision in the Franklin Templeton Case
The Karnataka High Court yesterday issued its 336-page ruling on the highly contested winding up of six schemes of the Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund (“FTMF”). FTMF’s decision was the subject matter of challenge before various High Courts, and the Supreme Court directed a transfer of all related petitions to the Karnataka High Court, which held a mammoth virtual hearing over several days before...
SEBI Rules on Misapplication of IPO Funds
In an order issued yesterday involving Birla Pacific Medspa Limited (“BPML”), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (“SEBI”) was faced with an alleged misapplication of IPO funds by the company way back in 2011. Through a prospectus issued on June 29, 2011, the company raised Rs. 65.17 crores to establish “Evolve” Medspa centres across India, which constituted the primary purpose of the...
Call for Submissions: Special Issue of NLS Business Law Review on International Arbitration
[Announcement on behalf of the NLS Business Law Review] The Board of Editors of the National Law School Business Law Review is pleased to invite original and unpublished manuscripts for the Special Issue of the NLS Business Law Review. About the Institution The National Law School of India University is an institution of legal education focusing on legal and policy education in India at the...
SEBI Relaxes Norms for Delisting of a Listed Subsidiary
[Sanjana Arvind Kumar and Divya Rau are final year law students at Jindal Global Law School] The Securities Exchange Board of India (“SEBI”) through, its board meeting, on 29 September 2020, approved an amendment to the SEBI (Delisting of Equity Shares) Regulations, 2009 (“Delisting Regulations”). The amendment aims to simplify the delisting procedure for listed subsidiaries of listed companies...
Foreign Contribution (Regulatory) Amendment Act, 2020: A Challenge for Non-Profits?
[Shreya Mishra and Ayesha Bhattacharya are recent graduates of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. The authors would like to thank Prof. Umakanth Varottil for his comments] Recently, the Central Government froze the accounts of Amnesty International India, citing violation of foreign funding laws, while the latter has accused the Central Government of halting its...
Why is Bilateral Netting Relevant?
[Lakshmi Babu is a corporate lawyer with an interest in financial regulation] The Central Government has recently notified the Bilateral Netting of Qualified Financial Contracts Act, 2020 (“Netting Act”), which intends to implement the process of bilateral netting among eligible financial parties. The Netting Act is effective from October 1, 2020. Netting, in essence, means the off-setting of all...
Demystifying the Air around Lease and Rental Operational Debt
[Aridaman Raghav is a 3rd year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi] The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (‘NCLAT’) in Anup Dubey v. National Agricultural Co-operative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED) Ltd. & Ors.(7 October 2020) has held that lease rentals arising out of the use of a cold storage unit for commercial purpose can be...
An Argument in Favour of an Effectively Mandatory CCI Approval Under Section 31(4) of the IBC- Part II
[Mayank Udhwani and Ragini Agarwal have recently graduated from National Law University, Jodhpur. Part I in this series is available here] In this two-part series, the authors argue that the provision under section 31(4) of the IBC must not be watered down and that approval from the CCI must be obtained prior to the approval of the resolution plan by the adjudicating authority. In part-I, the...
An Argument in Favour of an Effectively Mandatory CCI Approval Under Section 31(4) of the IBC – Part I
[Mayank Udhwani and Ragini Agarwal have recently graduated from National Law University, Jodhpur] The introduction of section 31(4) through the Insolvency and Bankruptcy (Second Amendment) Act, 2018 was intended to fine tune the workings of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 [‘IBC’]. The clause provides that the resolution applicant is required to obtain necessary statutory approvals...
Examining the Issues Related to TDR under GST
[Madhura Karanth is a fourth year student at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. The author is thankful to Mr. Mihir Naniwadekar for valuable inputs] A Joint Development Agreement (“JDA”) is common in the Indian construction industry. A landowner and a developer enter into such an arrangement, where the developer undertakes to develop the owner’s land. Usually, the constructed area is shared...
E-contracts and E-signatures in a Post-Covid Era – Deficiencies in the Current Framework?
[Ayesha Bhattacharya is a graduate of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata (Batch of 2019)] As the covid-19 pandemic continues to rage across the world, the corporate and the commercial factions of business have witnessed major disruptions. Most commercial negotiations rely on execution of documents in physical format and while start-ups and tech enabled businesses...
Regulating Listed PSUs for Disclosures and Transparency
[Gaurav Pingle is a practising company secretary] True, fair, adequate and timely disclosures form one of the basic tenets of governance in listed companies and are essential for maintaining the integrity of the securities market. Timely disclosures of material events are of significant importance. They also bring about transparency and enable the investors to take an informed investment or...
The Vodafone Arbitration and the Idea of the Rule of Law
[Nigam Nuggehalli is the Dean, School of Law, BML Munjal University. He is the author of a monograph on international taxation from an Indian perspective] On Friday last week, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague unanimously decided that India’s imposition of a retrospective tax on Vodafone was in violation of the India-Netherlands Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) that required the...
Scope of ‘Patent Illegality’ in Refusing Enforcement of Arbitral Awards
[Abhijeet Shrivastava is a 3rd year law student and Anujay Shrivastava a law graduate (class of 2020), both from Jindal Global Law School. We are extremely grateful to the editorial team at IndiaCorpLaw for their valuable inputs and editorial assistance.] Among the various grounds to set aside or refuse enforcement of an arbitral award, the ground of ‘patent illegality’ has been the subject of a...
Re-Inventing the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Innoventive Industries
[Ragini Agarwal is a graduate from National Law University, Jodhpur. The author would like to thank Mayank Udhwani for his inputs on the article.] Innoventive Industries v. ICICI Bank (2017) was the first landmark Supreme Court judgment that explained the ethos of the newly introduced Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (“IBC”) as a code that marked a “paradigm shift in law” (at paragraph 11) to...
Asset Allocation for Multi-Cap Funds
[Divya Rau is a final-year law student at Jindal Global Law School] The Securities Exchange Board of India (“SEBI”) issued new guidelines regarding asset allocation by multi-cap funds on 11 September 2020 (“New Circular”). A multi-cap fund refers to “an open ended equity scheme investing across large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap stocks”. Large-caps refer to the top 100 firms by market capitalisation...
Amendment to Section 7 of The IBC: A Well-Intentioned Constitutional Fallacy?
[Ridhi Arora and Hitoishi Sarkar are III Year B.A. LL.B (Hons.) students at Gujarat National Law University] Section 3 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy (Amendment) Act, 2020 (‘Amendment’), added certain provisos to section 7 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (‘Code’) whereby special conditions were added for real estate allottees to qualify as a financial creditor under the Code. The...
2019 Amendment to Arbitration Law: Foreign Arbitrators in Indian Seated Arbitrations
[Ajar Rab is a partner and Ankit Singh an associate at Rab & Rab Associates LLP, Dehradun] The Indian arbitration legal regime is often a subject of criticism, and the government has tried to plug the loopholes by bringing in several policy changes including amendments to the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 (“Act”). The most recent amendment passed in August 2019 (“Amendment”) was...
ARCs and Insolvency Resolution Plans: The Enigma of Equity vs Debt
[Sikha Bansal is a Partner at Vinod Kothari & Company] A regulatory framework for asset reconstruction companies (ARCs) was introduced in India through the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002 (SARFAESI Act). This intended to put in place a system for clearing up non-performing assets (NPAs) from the books of banks and financial...
The Use of Circumstantial Evidence in Securities Law Enforcement
[Shruti Rajan is a partner in the Financial Regulatory Practice at Trilegal. Vidhi Shah is an associate with the Financial Regulatory Practice at Trilegal.] Quasi-judicial authorities are not bound by strict rules of evidence. It is settled law that they are “entitled to act on material that may not be accepted as evidence in a court of law,” and examine all relevant information and data in...
SEBI’s New Pledge/Re-Pledge System Overhaul: An Appraisal
[Gayatri Puthran is a 3rd Year B.B.A., LL.B. student at the Jindal Global Law School] In a bid to promote ease of doing business, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (‘SEBI’) on 2 September 2020 by way of its circular titled ‘Disclosures on Margin obligations given by way of Pledge/ Re-Pledge in the Depository System’ (‘Disclosure Circular’) dispensed with certain disclosure...
Applicability of the Limitation Act to the IBC: The Curious Case of Veer Gurjar
[Yashika Gupta is a 5th year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur] On 14 August 2020, the Supreme Court (“SC”), yet again, cleared the air on the applicability of the Limitation Act, 1963 (“Limitation Act”) to the Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (“the Code”). In Babulal Varsharji Gurjar v. Veer Gurjar Aluminium Industries Pvt. Ltd., it categorically...
Audio-Perspectives on Bankruptcy Law during the Pandemic
In times of acute financial distress, such as these, one might expect to see bankruptcy practitioners and scholars to be the busiest. Bankruptcy law is often used as a tool to mitigate and deal with the impact of financial distress. As financially distressed firms and creditors seek the refuge of the law for debt recovery and re-organisation, one is likely to see an uptick in bankruptcy cases and...
NCLT’s Riddled Take on Enforcement of Foreign Awards under the IBC
[Sridutt Mishra is a 5th year student and Parthsarthi Srivastava is a 4th year student, both at National Law University Odisha] The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (‘IBC’) has always witnessed friction with respect to claims arising out of arbitration. In 2018, the Supreme Court settled the highly contested issue of whether an arbitral award pending challenge under section 34 of the...
Recent Comments