The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has approved the overall resolution plan of Piramal Group for Dewan Housing Finance Ltd (DHFL). The NCLT pronounced the order on Monday on the resolution plan submitted by Piramal Capital & Housing for the stressed DHFL.
Piramal Capital has already received approval from the Competition Commission of India (CCI) and Reserve Bank of India for its ₹34,250 crore bid to take over DHFL. PCHFL’s resolution plan for DHFL had received 94% votes by the committee of creditors. The bid amount will enable lenders to recover around 40% of their dues, out of the total admitted claims at ₹87,082 crore.
The DHFL resolution follows the endorsement of 94% of lenders.
The tribunal’s Mumbai-bench, chaired by H P Chaturvedi and Ravikumar Duraisamy, said the approval is subject to the final judgement from the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) and the Supreme Court’s judgement on Kapil Wadhawan in the matter.
In its order, NCLT asked DHFL’s Committee of Creditors (CoC) to consider giving more money to small fixed deposit holders under the approved resolution plan.
“We are not remanding the plan back to CoC, we respect their commercial wisdom,” it said.
NCLT also rejected former DHFL promoter Kapil Wadhawan’s plea to get access to a copy of the resolution plan.
The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) last month stayed the NCLT Mumbai bench’s order, directing the lenders of debt-ridden mortgage firm DHFL to consider the settlement offer by its erstwhile promoter Kapil Wadhawan. The appellate tribunal also directed the NCLT to decide over the application filed by the administrator over the bid submitted by Piramal Capital and Housing Finance for DHFL.
Wadhawan, who is facing charges of money laundering and diversion of bank funds, has repeatedly accused DHFL’s lenders of selling the company much below its fair value. Last November, Wadhawan requested an RBI-appointed DHFL administrator to be included in the bidding process, but the lenders chose to go for Piramal, which emerged as the highest bidder after an intense bidding war between Oaktree Capital, Adani group and distressed assets buyer SC Lowy.
Meanwhile, shares of DHFL today jumped nearly 10 per cent after the company reported a consolidated net profit of ₹96.75 crore for the last quarter of fiscal ended in March 2021.
The stock rallied 9.76 per cent to ₹20.80 – its highest trading permissible limit for the day – on both BSE and NSE.
The company, which is under corporate insolvency process, had posted a net loss of ₹7,507.01 crore in the January-March quarter of the year-ago fiscal. The company had reported a loss of ₹13,095.38 crore in the December quarter of 2020-21.
