Last Friday, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) suspended the present directors on the board of distressed realty firm Unitech Ltd. Simultaneously, it permitted the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA), which had made an application to take charge of the firm in order to safeguard “public interest”, to suggest names of 10 new nominee directors by 20 December.
What constitutes “public interest”? In this case, “public interest” was invoked because there were 19,000 home buyers stranded for several years, 51,000 small depositors to whom the company owes a total of Rs723 crore, and several institutional lenders and creditors. But loans and small depositors are common to many other distressed firms—what seems to have invited government intervention is the plight of home buyers. The additional solicitor said as much when he told the tribunal that they wanted to avoid insolvency proceedings for the company because 19,000 home buyers would be left high and dry.
Unitech is in deep trouble—its borrowings scaled Rs6,000 crore by end-March 2017, with no cash-flows to service the debt, given its consolidated loss of Rs402 crore on a revenue of Rs1,795 crore during the year. Moreover, the NCLT order cites a “large number of other irregularities that have been investigated…”
Some draw an analogy with Satyam Computer Services Ltd’s case a decade ago, where MCA stepped in to find suitors for the debt-laden firm that was among the top five IT firms in India, after a confession by the promoter of fraudulent transactions and fudging of accounts. The company was finally sold to TechMahindra. But that case was different from Unitech, not least because the realty company denies any wrong-doing and the charges are yet to be proven in a court of law. But then, the savings of supposedly ‘middle class’ people were not at stake in the Satyam case.