[The following guest post is contributed by Vinod Kothari of Vinod Kothari & Co.] The Bankruptcy Laws Reforms Committee (“BLRC”) headed by Dr. T. K. Viswanathan recently submitted its final report (“Final Report”) to the Ministry of Finance. Before this, an interim report (“Interim Report”) was submitted earlier in February 2015. While the Interim Report merely recommended some amendments to...
Proposed Bankruptcy Code Unveiled
The much-awaited reform of bankruptcy law in India has witnessed a momentous step with the finalization of the report of the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee, which was issued yesterday. The report contains two parts: the Rationale and Design and a draft of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Bill, 2015. Of course, it is impossible to discuss the details of the reforms proposed within the confines of a...
Committee to Review the Companies Act
Although the Companies Act, 2013 is brand new and yet to be brought into force in its entirety, there is already a lot of discussion about the need to reevaluate the legislation. The Government has taken initial steps to address some of the issues by way of the Companies (Amendment) Act, 2015. However, as we have previously noted, the amendments are not very significant and are mostly procedural...
Budget 2015: Ease of Doing Business
The Government’s focus on enhancing the ease of doing business in India is abundantly evident from the Budget. This involves not only issues of licensing and approvals, but also matters for legal reform. In this post, I argue that while the proposals in the Budget will certainly help grow industry and foreign investment, many of these measures appear to correlate precisely with the need to...
Report on Bankruptcy Law Reforms
The state of bankruptcy law in India continues to leave much to be desired, and adds to the difficulties in doing business in the country. Several previous efforts have been undertaken towards reforms, but they have either been introduced on a piecemeal basis or have not entirely been successful. With this in mind, the Government had last year appointed the Bankruptcy Law Reform Committee (BLRC)...
Winding-up Petitions and Arbitration Clauses
The relationship between the statutory remedies provided by the Companies Act and the Arbitration Act has proven to be controversial in recent times. The difficulty arises usually because the basis on which the statutory remedy is invoked (eg oppression, winding-up) is often an underlying commercial dispute which is the subject matter of an arbitration clause. The courts have given different...
Revival of Sick Units Takes Precedence Over Loan Recovery
[The following post is contributed by Prachi Narayan of Vinod Kothari & Company. She can be contacted at [email protected]] The Supreme Court in its judgment in the case of KSL Industries Ltd vs. Arihant Threads Ltd on October 27, 2014 finally settled the position of law over the vexed issue of precedence of two special enactments, the Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions)...
Paper on Corporate Insolvency Laws in India
Professor Kristin van Zwieten has posted on SSRN a new paper titled “Corporate Rescue in India: The Influence of the Courts”, the abstract of which is as follows: India is poised for significant reform to its corporate insolvency laws, including the introduction of a new rescue procedure. The reforms follow two decades of sustained criticism of the law, critics complaining of lengthy delays and a...
The Meaning of ‘Inability to Pay Debts’ for the Purpose of Winding-up
The test for statutory winding-up in Indian company law has a long history. Section 434(1)(a) and 434(1)(c) of the Companies Act, 1956 was based on section 223 of the English Companies Act, 1948, and the new Companies Act, 2013, retains this language (see section 271), although the language has been slightly modified in later British legislation (sections 89 and 123 of the Insolvency Act, 1986)...
The Bombay High Court on the Agreed Sum and Penalties: A Missed Opportunity?
It has often been said that a court cannot arrive at the right answer unless it asks itself the right question. This resonates particularly in the field of private law, because—as it is perhaps more technical and complex than some other areas of the law—the applicability of certain rules depends upon the characterisation of the issue at hand (for eg, is it a sale or a licence, a penalty or...
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