NE LEGAL BUREAU
CHENNAI, JULY 16
A petition has been filed in the Madras High Court for a direction to authorities concerned to make the regional bench of the National Company Law Tribunal here fully functional by filling up the vacancies for the posts of members.
The first bench of Chief Justice Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy, before which the PIL petition from V Venkatesa Sivakumar came up for hearing on Thursday, ordered three weeks’ notice to the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
According to the petitioner, the infrastructural facilities were made available in 2018 itself for the Tribunal, but the third bench did not come into operation, as it lacked members.
Presently, there are 27 division benches across India requiring 54 adjudicating authorities. However, there are only 42 such authorities. Of them, 21 are judicial members and the remaining 21 are technical members.
The Union ministry, taking into account the number of cases pending in Tamil Nadu, constituted three division benches for the regional NCLT in Chennai in 2017.
But, there were only two division benches and that too one division bench with only one judicial member, contrary to the provisions of the Act. The third one is yet to take off, he added.
