Insolvency row: SBI moves NCLT against debt-ridden IVRCL as deadline looms

Move comes months after IVRCL failed to get a new promoter on board within the prescribed time limit

The State Bank of India (SBI) on Monday moved the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) against Hyderabad-based infrastructure company IVRCL as the deadline to resolve the large non-performing assets (NPA) outside the NCLT mechanism is set to expire on December 13.

The bank has filed a petition before the Hyderabad bench of NCLT under Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) seeking the initiation of insolvency process for IVRCL in the second list. Section 7 of the IBC, 2016 provides the procedure for initiation of insolvency resolution process for the financial creditor.

The move comes months after IVRCL management, which has been under the control of lenders following the implementation of strategic debt restructuring (SDR) in January 2016, failed to get a new promoter on board within the prescribed 18-month time limit.

A senior company official confirmed the development. "SBI has filed a petition for initiation of insolvency resolution, not necessarily for the liquidation, but to find an investor who can come up with a resolution plan to turn around the debt-laden company," the official said.

The SBI representative was not immediately available for comment.

Though the company has been talking to potential buyers for long, both the lenders as well as the interested parties have favoured a resolution under the NCLT mechanism as they are worried over the controversies that could potentially arise if they settle the matter with the corporate borrower themselves, said an official to Business Standard on condition of anonymity.

According to reports, IVRCL has a total debt of little over Rs 10,000 crore. However, the company in its recent filing has maintained that it has a total debt obligation at Rs 5,556 crore besides the accumulated losses of close to Rs 3,000 crore on its books. 

The rise in debt could be due to invocation of bank guarantees, according to sources.

In June, banks had referred 11 out of 12 NPA cases to NCLT on the direction of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The banking regulator had come out with a second list with 28-30 large borrowers, which together have an exposure of Rs 1.82 lakh crore debt.

The second list includes some of the largest borrowers such as Jaiprakash Associates (gross debt of Rs 67,977 crore), Videocon Industries (gross debt of Rs 47,554 crore) and IVRCL (Rs 10,107 crore), while half-a-dozen of those figured in the list hail from the undivided Andhra Pradesh. These include Anrak Aluminium, Coastal Projects Limited, Soma Enterprises among others.