The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) at Kolkata on Tuesday, February 20, allowed insolvency proceedings against a 104-year-old company for failure to clear dues of over Rs 4 crore, according to a report on barandbench.com. The case involves the Ahmedabad-based private construction firm Chevrox Construction Pvt. Ltd against state-owned Bridge and Roof Co (India) Ltd.
Bridge and Roof is a public sector enterprise (PSU) under the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and comes under the administrative control of the Ministry of Heavy Industries.
Chevrox Constructions approached the Kolkata bench of the tribunal seeking to start the corporate insolvency resolution process (CIRP) against the PSU for an alleged default in payment of ₹4,47,90,393, the report added.
Judicial member Rohit Kapoor and technical member Balraj Joshi admitted the company into insolvency, observing that there is a clear debt and default in repayment of debt. It appointed Subodh Kumar Agrawal as the interim resolution professional for the insolvency process.
In its petition, Chevrox stated that it had signed eleven separate Letters of Intent (LoIs) for various sections of civil work in Gujarat with Bridge and Roof. The LoIs were in effect between December 2018 and February 2021. Chevrox noted that Bridge and Rof had not made the required payments even after finishing all the work.
In September 2022, it served Bridge and Roof with a demand notice under Section 8 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). Chevrox contacted the NCLT after receiving neither a response nor payment on the notice.
Bridge and Roof objected to the application, claiming that Chevrox had not finished the job. It also claimed that Chevrox failed to provide a final bill for payment within three months of the work's actual completion.
The tribunal noted that Roof and Bridge had taken payments through June 2020 and that the bills for the subsequent time were being reviewed.
(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)
