Insolvency And Bankruptcy Code: One-Year Report Card

The popular discourse on the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has, since its enactment, largely focused on the evolving jurisprudence in the not-so-regular cases, legislative interventions by the Parliament, regulatory interventions by the Reserve Bank of India and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India, and the first set of 12 large cases identified by the RBI.

While such discourse helps in tracking the evolution of the IBC as a law, it gives us limited visibility on how the IBC is working out for the average case. Ignoring the average case and limiting our focus to individual developments is dangerous, as we may end up missing the woods for the trees. Understanding the overall impact of the IBC requires us to depart from an individual case based approach and move towards an empirical analysis of the cases being tried under the IBC.

Such analysis will help us objectively see how the IBC is panning out for an average creditor and an average debtor. It will help us see how the institutions are performing on average. Finally, it will help us ground future bankruptcy policy in sound analysis backed by systematically collected empirical evidence, and reduce the scope for relying on anecdotal evidence. At the least, it will help us ground intuitive propositions in data.

In a modest attempt at empirically understanding the impact of the IBC, we seek to answer two broad questions relating to the IBC: (a) its economic impact; and (b) the performance of one of the judicial institutions under the IBC.

To understand the economic impact of the IBC, we ask questions regarding the characteristics of persons invoking the IBC and the frequency with which cases are being admitted or dismissed. Answering these questions facilitates an understanding of the economic actors using or attempting to use the law. Intelligent extrapolation of this data may also potentially throw light on the impact of the law on the credit culture in India.

In the context of (b), we focus on the performance of the National Company Law Tribunal under the IBC. The reason for this is two-fold. First, the NCLT plays the most significant role in the active cases under the IBC. Second, the judicial orders that are transparently available in the public domain provide the perfect opportunity to empirically analyse the performance of the NCLT as an institution.

We answer these questions by analysing the orders passed by the NCLT since the operationalisation of the IBC. We hand-collect data on certain pre-identified fields of information from these orders to build a data-set of 830 NCLT orders disposing of insolvency petitions from December 1, 2016, up to November 30, 2017. We capture information such as who triggered the IBC, the kind of creditors involved, the amount of debt in default, the date of filing, the date of first hearing, the date of final disposal, outcome of the petition and where the petition is dismissed, the reason for dismissal, etc. We limit our data to fresh filings under the IBC (including petitions transferred from the erstwhile Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction), and omit the winding-up petitions that are transferred from High Courts. A detailed description of the data-set, the fields captured and the reason for capturing some fields of information over others can be found here.

Observing the NCLT orders passed in one year allows us to build a time-series and see the relative developments across four quarters. For the purpose of our analysis, we define the quarters as under:

• Q1 = December 1, 2016 to February 28, 2017
• Q2 = March 1, 2017 to May 31, 2017
• Q3 = June 1, 2017 to August 31, 2017
• Q4 = September 1, 2017 to November 30, 2017

In this article, we summarise some important preliminary findings from our analysis.

Who Has Been Using The IBC?

The chart below gives an overview of the persons who have been triggering the IBC across four quarters.

This chart shows that creditors have sought to use the IBC much more than the corporate debtor.

However, across the four quarters, while the number of petitions filed by creditors has steadily increased, the number of petitions by debtors dropped after the third quarter. The reason for an initially high number of petitions by corporate debtors could be attributed to the transition of the petitions pending before the erstwhile BIFR, as the IBC allows a period of six months within which such petitions may be transitioned into the IBC framework.
However, the number of corporate debtor filings started falling after August 2017. While these are very early indications, it does not augur well for an insolvency regime that must ideally incentivise the promoter or the debtor itself to seek resolution at its own instance. This is because a promoter or the debtor itself is best placed to know about an impending default, and a timely trigger by the debtor may save value for all the stakeholders.

What Kinds Of Creditors Are Using The IBC?

The chart below gives an overview of the kinds of creditors that have been seeking resolution under the IBC.

With 65 percent of the creditor-petitions having been filed by operational creditors, they dominate the number of filings made under the IBC across the four quarters.

The fact that operational creditors triggered the IBC much more than the financial creditors led to criticism that the law was being used as a recovery tool, as opposed to an effective mechanism for collective action by the creditors and restructuring. However, the subsequent drop in the number of petitions by operational creditors may be indicative of two possibilities. First, that the law has been internalised by debtors, who see dispossession from management as a credible threat.

Second, that operational creditors see lesser value in using the IBC, due to the costs involved and the fact that they are not part of the decision making process in resolution under the IBC. If we see a consistent decline in the number of petitions filed by operational creditors over time, the data on settlements may shed light on which of these two possibilities is more likely.

Among the operational creditors, we see that vendors or suppliers are using the IBC much more than the other type of operational creditors. Vendors refer to suppliers of goods and services to the debtor. The table below presents the types of operational creditors, who have been using the IBC across the four quarters during the sample period.

Outcomes Of Insolvency Petitions

The chart below shows the admission and dismissal rates across operational and financial creditors.