In a new turn of events, the Mumbai bench of National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) asked the committee of the creditors to consider the offer made by Company’s Chairman and Managing Director, Kapil Wadhawan and apprise the Court with the next ten days.
Wadhawan, in a letter to DHFL Administrator and CoC, claimed that his proposal in December,2020, provides for full repayment of the principal to all creditors. The settlement plan submitted by Wadhawan, promised an upfront payment of ₹9,000 crore in cash, out of the free cash on the books of DHFL and ₹31,000 crore to be paid within seven years in equal annual instalments with 8.5 per cent interest to the financial creditors. The repayments would be funded through a change in DHFL’s operations and creating more retail assets on the loan book.
In an earlier plan, Wadhawan had proposed to repay lenders by selling assets.The lenders had rejected the offer citing lack of credibility and valuation attached to the proposed asset sale and voted in January, 2021, to selling DHFL to Piramal Group under the bankruptcy process, after Piramal Capital and Housing Finance Ltd, a subsidiary of the Piramal Enterprises Limited, had won the bid for acquiring DHFL. The resolution had received approvals from Reserve Bank of India in February 2021 and Competition Commission of India in April 2021.
Diwan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd, DHFL, is a deposit-taking housing finance company. In 2019, Cobrapost, an Indian investigative journalist group published an expose of DHFL for various shell corporations to siphon more that 31,000 crores of public money for personal gains of the DHLF’s primary stakeholder, Kapil Wadhawan. DHFL owed over 90,000 crores to banks and other investors when it went bankrupt. The promoter family, including Wadhawan, are being investigated for corruption and siphoning off funds.
