AA Rightly Rejected Appellant’s Claim Before RP for Consultancy Services As He Couldn’t Substantiate Claims | NCLAT

Case Details: Umesh Kumar v. Narendra Kumar Sharma, Insolvency Resolution Professional of Indirapuram Habitat Centre (P.) Ltd. - [2024] 159 taxmann.com 707 (NCLAT-New Delhi)

Judiciary and Counsel Details

• • Ashok Bhushan, Chairperson, Barun Mitra & Arun Baroka, Technical Member
  • Ms Nattasha Garg, Thakur Ankit Singh, Srikant Singh & Ms Shristy Singh, Advs. for the Appellant.
  • Sumesh Dhawan, Praful Jindal, Shaurya Shyam, Advs. & N.K. Sharma for the Respondent.

Facts of the Case

In the instant case, the appellant (i.e. operational creditor) claimed that he was hired as a media management consultant on a monthly retainer ship of Rs.10 lakhs per month for which purpose, the appellant had entered into a Consultancy Agreement with the corporate debtor.

After the corporate debtor was admitted into insolvency, the Resolution Professional (RP) invited claims, in which the appellant filed its claims vide e-mail dated 28.03.2020. However, the same was rejected by RP. Thereafter, the appellant filed an application before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) seeking direction to RP to admit its claim.

The NCLT vide the impugned order rejected the said application on the ground that the appellant failed to show any document to substantiate the plea of rendering services by the appellant to the corporate debtor. Thus, there was no infirmity in the conclusion drawn by RP that he could not find any media service rendered by the appellant during the period for which consultancy fees were claimed.

Aggrieved by the NCLT’s order, the appellant filed an instant appeal before the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT).

It was noted that an e-mail was sent to RP enclosing the GST invoice for consultancy till August 2019 and in the said tax invoice service Description” column of the invoice, only the words “Management Consultancy” were stated without giving any further details.

It was further noted that RP had made it clear that due to want of documents in support of their claims, RP was unable to verify the claims of the appellant whenever, the appellant failed to comply with the persistent request of RP for documents.

NCLAT Held

The NCLAT held that there was no incidence of wilful negligence, or deliberate stone-walling of claims on the part of RP in dealing with the appellant’s claim. Further, where RP had been consistently pointing out that he was not in a position to verify claims due to want of documents substantiating claims, the impugned order passed by the NCLT rejecting the application of the appellant seeking acceptance of their claims which had been rejected by RP, didn’t suffer from any infirmities.