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...
BNP Paribas v UB Holdings: The Karnataka High Court on s 536(2)
In its recent judgment in BNP Paribas v UB Holdings, a Division Bench of the Karnataka High Court has considered an important question of insolvency law. The case has been widely reported in the press, of course, for it set aside a sale of shares to Diageo and made some observations about parallel transactions. But it is important to note that all of the High Court’s comments on the merits of the...
Damodaran Committee Report: Impact on Impulsive Law Making
[In yesterday’s post, we had briefly discussed the publication of the Damodaran Committee on Reforming the Regulatory Environment for Doing Business in India, and its broad impact. In this post, Nidhi Bothra at Vinod Kothari & Co discusses the report in greater detail. Nidhi can be contacted at [email protected]] The Damodaran Committee was set up by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs to...
A Review and Analysis of the CDR Mechanism
The out-of-court approach for corporate debt restructuring (CDR) was instituted by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) over a decade ago. While it has been successful in several cases, there have also been significant shortcomings with the CDR mechanism. In a recent speech, a Deputy Governor of the RBI undertakes a review of the CDR mechanism. A number of issues are examined in the speech, including...
Substance vs. Form Conflict in True Sale | Hong Kong Court Goes by the Language Used by the Parties
(The following post is contributed by Soma Bagaria, who is a Legal Advisor at Vinod Kothari & Company in Kolkata. She can be reached at [email protected]) In every assignment transaction, there has been a constant conflict of whether the substance or form shall dominate while determining the nature of a transaction. There are two schools of thought on this: one which gives dominance to...
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