2024 (8) TMI 1721

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.... an award may not be made after three months have elapsed from the date on which the party making that application had received the arbitral award. The proviso thereto states that if the Court is satisfied that the applicant was prevented by sufficient cause from making the application within the said period of three months, it may entertain the application within a further period of thirty days, but not thereafter. Thus, the statute specifically debars an application from being entertained after three months. The thirty days' grace period given thereafter is subject to the discretion of the Court and, thus, cannot be said to come within the ambit of the 'limitation period'. In the present case, even if the admitted case of the petitioner is taken, the impugned award was received by the petitioner on November 30, 2019 whereas the present challenge has been filed under Section 34 on November 16, 2023, much after the expiry of the period of three months as well as thirty days thereafter. It is argued that in the judgments of the Supreme Court referred to by the petitioner in the context of the Pandemic relaxation, the outer limit of expiry of the limitation perio....

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..... Besides being the point of reference and the sine qua non for applying Section 16(6) of the IBC, it also specified the period of time which will be excluded in computing the period of limitation. Section 60(6), read conjointly with Section 14 of the IBC indicates that the entire period of the moratorium under Section 14 is liable to be excluded in computing the period of limitation even in a suit or an application by or against a corporate debtor which is not barred by Section 14 of the Act. Coming to the timelines in the present case, the petitioner contends that the impugned award was received by the petitioner by speed post on November 30, 2019 and the period of three months stipulated in Section 34(3) of the 1996 Act expired on February 28, 2020. Thereafter, a further period of thirty days was available to the petitioner to prefer the challenge under Section 34, but the Pandemic lockdown intervened on and from March 15, 2020. As per the judgments of the Supreme Court, the entire period from March 15, 2020 till February 28, 2022 was excluded from limitation. However, at the time of expiry of such ninety days from March 1, 2022, the respondent/corporate debtor was still u....

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....ondent-company. It commenced from October 8, 2021 and culminated in final approval of the Resolution Plan on August 11, 2023. The petitioner seeks to take advantage of both periods and argues that ninety days given by way of relaxation for the Pandemic by the Supreme Court would commence from expiry of the CIRP on August 11, 2023 and, thus, would end on November 11, 2023, which fell during the Annual Puja Vacation of this court. Since the vacation period is automatically excluded, according to the petitioner the application was not hit by limitation as it was filed on the reopening date immediately after the end of the vacation period. Upon considering the submissions of parties, however, this Court is of the clear opinion that the petitioner cannot claim the best of both worlds, simultaneously claiming the Pandemic relaxation afforded by the Supreme Court and taking advantage of the moratorium under Section 14 of the IBC due to the pending CIRP in respect of the respondent-company. As discussed above, the outer limit till which time would be excluded, as per the judgment in Cognizance for Extension of Limitation (supra), would be ninety days starting from March 1, 2020. T....

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....iling the application entirely due to the Pandemic. For taking advantage of such relaxation, the limitation period itself had to end between March 15, 2020 and February 28, 2020, which is the Pandemic relaxation period granted by the Supreme Court. However, as on March 15, 2020, the petitioner had already exhausted the three months plus a further fifteen days out of the total thirty days of life given to the limitation period. Hence, even as on March 15, 2020, the petitioner had only fifteen days of limitation left to file the application under Section 34. If the petitioner seeks to take advantage of Pandemic relaxation, such relaxation ended on February 28, 2020 and limitation again begun to run from March 1, 2022. Giving the fullest and most liberal interpretation to the Supreme Court Pandemic judgments, the petitioner would have further ninety days for filing of the application. Such ninety days period also expired on May 29, 2022. Thus, from May 30, 2022 onwards, the petitioner could not have taken advantage of the Pandemic relaxation. What the present petitioner seeks to do is to defer the ninety days' relaxation to a future period of its own choice according to i....