Operational creditors yet again

When the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee (BLRC) submitted its report nearly two years ago, one of my major concerns was the dubious and unwarranted distinction that it made between operational and financial creditors (see my blog posts here and here). This invidious distinction has come back to haunt us today as home buyers find themselves in the lurch when bankruptcy proceedings are initiated against the developer. Pratik Datta tells the full story of this mess in her blog post at Ajay Shah’s blog.

This is symptomatic of a deeper problem with how bankruptcy reform in India has developed as a bailout of the financial sector rather than as a reform of the real economy. From the Debt Recovery Tribunal to SARFAESI to the Bankruptcy Code, banks were privileged over other creditors and financial creditors over operational creditors. It would appear that the dominant goal has been to save the banks. Jason Kilborn articulates the problem very elegantly in his blog post at Credit Slips:

It seems to me a sign of serious regulatory dysfunction when a government expressly uses bankruptcy law as a means of collection, rather than rescue or at least collective redress, with an aim to treating economic stagnation.

It is particularly telling that there has been a profound unwillingness to apply bankruptcy principles to the financial sector itself: Global Trust Bank was merged instead of being left to die; Unit 64 was bailed out; even today, there is no willingness to liquidate even the worst public sector banks. One has to go back half a century to Palai Central Bank for an example of a bank of any significance being allowed to die (though only after a lot of dilly dallying).

Posted at 2:07 pm IST on Tue, 29 Aug 2017         permanent link

Comments