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M/s Reliance Asset Reconstruction Company Ltd. v. M/s Hotel Poonja International Pvt. Ltd.

Civil Appeal · 2021 INSC 35Decided 21 Jan 2021
Civil Appeal No. 4221 of 2020
Justice Indira Banerjee · Justice Sanjiv Khanna

Background

A hotel company had taken a Rs. 40 lakh term loan from Vijaya Bank in 1986, which was declared a non-performing asset (NPA) in 1993 after default. The bank obtained a recovery certificate from a Debt Recovery Tribunal in 2003 and later assigned its dues to Reliance Asset Reconstruction Company in 2011. In 2018, the Reconstruction Company filed an application before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) seeking to initiate insolvency proceedings against the hotel company, but both the NCLT and the NCLAT (appellate tribunal) rejected it as time-barred.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court upheld the dismissal, holding that an application under Section 7 of the IBC must be filed within three years of the date of default (here, 1993, or at the latest 2003 when the recovery certificate issued), and this application filed in 2018 was far too late. The Court rejected the argument that a 2017 balance sheet entry and a 2019 settlement-offer letter from the debtor amounted to a fresh "acknowledgment of liability" that would restart the limitation clock, finding both documents actually disputed or denied the debt rather than admitting it. The Court reiterated that the IBC is an insolvency-resolution mechanism, not a substitute for ordinary debt-recovery proceedings, and noted the creditor still had a live recovery route through the DRT execution proceedings.

Lesson Learnt

A loan default alone does not keep an insolvency claim alive indefinitely: creditors must act within three years of default (or of a genuine written acknowledgment of the debt), and vague or disputing correspondence from a debtor will not count as an acknowledgment that revives a time-barred claim.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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