The National Company Law Tribunal has stayed its own order that had cleared media baron Subhash Chandra to settle his personal insolvency proceedings for a fraction of what he owes, reopening a dispute that has dragged on for over a year without resolution. A special five-member bench headed by tribunal president Anupinder Singh Grewal ruled on Tuesday that no clear majority view had emerged on the repayment plan and put the earlier order on hold, effectively sending the Zee Entertainment founder’s case back to square one.
At the heart of the matter is a repayment proposal under which Chandra offered ₹6.25 crore to creditors and ₹25 lakh towards process costs against admitted claims exceeding ₹22,006 crore, translating to a haircut of nearly 99.97 percent for lenders. Despite the scale of the write-down, creditors holding roughly 80.8 percent of the voting share had approved the plan, a fact that has done little to settle the tribunal’s internal disagreement over how the case should proceed.
The confusion traces back to a split verdict delivered in September last year, when a two-member bench could not agree on the plan’s validity, with one member approving it while the other rejected it citing irregularities in the admission of claims and the voting process. The impasse pushed the matter to a third member, who on August 25 approved the repayment plan, but only subject to the exclusion of certain disputed claims and a reallocation of their share among eligible creditors. That approval, however, has now been clarified by the special bench as not carrying the weight of a final or majority decision, since the tie-breaking judge’s view alone cannot settle a matter where the original two members remained divided.
Leaning on Section 419(5) of the Companies Act, the special bench has decided to hear the entire dispute afresh, issuing notices to Chandra as well as to the lenders involved. In the interim, the tribunal has placed a significant restriction on the businessman, directing that he shall not alienate any of his properties directly or indirectly for the duration of the proceedings, a move aimed at preserving the status quo while the larger question of his liability is examined from scratch. The original plan had first come up before a bench comprising Judicial Member Ashok Kumar Bhardwaj and Technical Member Reena Sinha Puri, before the disagreements pushed it through successive rounds of reference and review.
The case forms part of the broader fallout from the Essel Group’s debt troubles, which trace back to Chandra’s 2016 borrowings against Dish TV shares and real estate holdings, obligations that later passed partly into the hands of asset reconstruction companies and ballooned into the insolvency claims now before the NCLT. With the tribunal signalling that the earlier resolution lacked the institutional backing to stand, creditors and observers alike will now be watching closely to see whether a fresh hearing produces a outcome that better reflects the scale of what is owed.