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Legal Case Shots

Court judgements broken down into the case type, how the decision played out, and the lesson worth remembering, with the full judgement available as a PDF.

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Legal Case Shots is a searchable database of Supreme Court of India judgments, each broken down into the case type, the court's key holding, and a practical lesson learnt, with the full judgment available as a PDF for citation or deeper reading.

Civil ProcedureSupreme Court of India

Aditya Khaitan & Ors. vs IL and FS Financial Services Limited

Civil Appeal · 2023 INSC 867Decided 3 Oct 2023
Civil Appeal Nos. 6411-6418 of 2023
J.K. Maheshwari · K.V. Viswanathan

Background

IL and FS Financial Services Limited filed a commercial recovery suit against nine defendants (the appellants) in the Calcutta High Court in August 2019. Summons was served in February 2020, giving 30 days (extendable to a 120-day outer limit) to file written statements, but this window fell squarely within the COVID-19 lockdown period. The defendants filed their written statements only in January 2021, relying on the Supreme Court's suo motu orders extending limitation periods nationwide due to the pandemic, but the High Court refused to take the written statements on record, holding (based on an earlier Supreme Court ruling, Sagufa Ahmed) that the extension applied only to limitation for filing suits, not the outer condonable period for written statements, which had already expired before the pandemic orders began.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that later orders passed in the same suo motu COVID limitation proceedings (dated March 2021, April 2021, and September 2021) had gone further than the earlier orders considered in Sagufa Ahmed, expressly excluding the pandemic period even from the outer limits within which delay could be condoned: a point already recognised in the Court's subsequent decision in Prakash Corporates vs. Dee Vee Projects. Applying this expanded protection, the Court found that once the COVID-period exclusion was properly applied, the defendants' written statements filed in January 2021 were actually within time. It therefore set aside the High Court's judgment and directed that the written statements be taken on record, allowing the suit to proceed.

Lesson Learnt

Limitation periods suspended by the Supreme Court's pandemic-era orders were later clarified to cover not just the time for filing a case but also the outer limits for condoning delay in related procedural steps like written statements: litigants and courts must look at the full, later sequence of these orders rather than relying on an earlier, narrower interpretation.

Aditya Khaitan & Ors. vs IL and FS Financial Services Limited – Legal Case Shots | LegalAware