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Vinay Kumar Mittal & Ors. v. Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd. & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2020 INSC 121Decided 31 Jan 2020
Civil Appeal Nos. 654-660 of 2020
Justice L. Nageswara Rao · Justice Deepak Gupta

Background

The appellants were depositors who had placed fixed deposits with Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd. (DHFL). After DHFL ran into financial trouble, the Bombay High Court and a Debts Recovery Tribunal passed interim orders restraining DHFL from making payments to various creditors, which effectively froze repayment of the depositors' matured fixed deposits. Subsequently, the Reserve Bank of India initiated a Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process against DHFL before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), an Administrator was appointed, and a Committee of Creditors (CoC) was formed, which decided to let DHFL resume fresh lending without first repaying the depositors. The depositors appealed to the Supreme Court against the High Court/Tribunal orders and challenged the CoC's decision.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court noted that with the insolvency process now underway, the depositors were being represented before the Committee of Creditors by an authorized representative and could raise all their concerns there. The Court explicitly declined to go into the merits of whether the depositors' claims should be prioritised, holding instead that this question should be left to the Committee of Creditors, the Administrator, and if necessary the NCLT. The Court directed that the depositors' claims must be considered by the Committee of Creditors without being influenced by the earlier High Court/Tribunal orders, and declined to interfere with the Committee's decision allowing DHFL to resume lending. The appeals were accordingly disposed of without any order as to costs, with liberty to the appellants to pursue their contentions in the insolvency forums.

Lesson Learnt

Once a company enters formal insolvency proceedings, individual creditors (including fixed depositors) generally cannot get courts outside the insolvency process to grant them special relief: their claims and priority must ordinarily be pursued through the Committee of Creditors and the insolvency tribunal (NCLT), which the law has placed in charge of the process.

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

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