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Liberty House Looks To Approach NCLT On Disqualified Bhushan Power Bid

Lenders rejected Liberty House’s bid for Bhushan Power & Steel.



An employee cuts a sample from a roll of coiled steel inside Liberty House Group’s rolling steel mill in Newport, U.K. (Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)
An employee cuts a sample from a roll of coiled steel inside Liberty House Group’s rolling steel mill in Newport, U.K. (Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)

Liberty House UK, which has expressed interest in the assets of Bhushan Power & Steel, says it will approach the National Company Law Tribunal to challenge the rejection of its bid.

In an email statement on Thursday, Liberty House said that it had submitted a bid for the Delhi-based steelmaker before the other bids were opened by the committee of creditors (CoC). This, according to Liberty House, should have allowed for their bid to be considered.

"The creditors wanted to open our bid as they know its higher but lawyers stopped them. We will go to the NCLT and ask them to direct RP (resolution professional) and CoC to open our bid," the statement said.

Liberty House submitted its bid on Tuesday, a day before the committee of creditors was set to meet to discuss the bids, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. On Wednesday, BloombergQuint reported that lenders had decided to reject the bids.

An email sent to resolution professional Mahender Khandelwal on Thursday morning to confirm the sequence of events was not answered till the time of publishing.

Bhushan Power & Steel is one of the 12 large stressed accounts being resolved under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, following directions from the Reserve Bank of India. The deadline for submitting final resolution plans for Bhushan Power & Steel closed on Feb. 8. At the close of deadline, Tata Steel Ltd. and JSW Steel Ltd. were the only ones who had submitted resolution plans.

Liberty House, in its press statement, claimed that its bid was higher than competing bids and should have been put forth to the committee of creditors. BloombergQuint could not independently verify the value of Liberty House’s bid. Among the two other bidders, Tata Steel’s offer had emerged as the highest, BloombergQuint reported.

The process is not supposed to deny creditors to recover more money on these bad debts, that would not be fair as this (is) public money. Nowhere in the world you can have a bizarre system where creditors can be denied recovery.
Liberty House Statement

Apart from Bhushan Power & Steel, Liberty House has also bid for Amtek Auto's assets.