The Chartered Accountant, V. Venkata Siva Kumar approached the Madras High Court seeking directions to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs to get the third bench of Chennai National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) functional.
As per the petitioner, at present there are 27 Division Benches across the Nation requiring 54 Adjudicating Authorities. However, there are only 42 Adjudicating Authorities (Of which 21 of them are Judicial Members and 21 of them are Technical Members). Thus, there is already a short fall of 12 Judges and the Benches are functioning with 20% shortage since August 2019. It is expected that in May 2021 another Six to Eight Adjudicating Authorities will retire, further increasing the shortfall to eighteen.
The petition reads, “important Economic Legislation has failed to achieve its objectives only because of wrong implementation by the Respondents who are not willing to recognize and address the loop holes in the system.”
Moreover, the petitioner contended that lack of benches clearly establishas a result of judicial delays, the sick companies admitted to Resolution Process are stuck up with continued litigation from the aggrieved stakeholders, resulting in the entire revival process which is time bound being seriously affected. The workers, their Families and the Operational Creditors most of whom are MSME’s (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) dependent for their survival on the revival of the Companies are left in the lurch. Further approaching the Tribunals has gone beyond their reach because of repeated Adjournments and high cost of engaging Senior Lawyers, resulting in a situation of ineffective and High-Cost Justicethus violating the Article 21 of our Constitution.
Therefore, the petitioner has prayed that a Writ of Mandamus or any other Writ to be issued to the Respondent to immediately Operationalise the 3rd Division Bench at Chennai NCLT for which the infrastructure was already made ready in 2018 and fill up all the vacant posts of the Adjudicating Authorities in the NCLT Benches in particular at Chennai as per the notification dated 26th August 2019.
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