Pinaki Majumdar
Jamshedpur, Aug 2: Employees of Incab Industries Limited which has been lying closed for over two decades are hopeful of getting justice from the new Resolution Professional (RP), Pankaj Kumar Tibrewal.
Tibrewal was recently appointed as the new RP by the Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal ( NCLT ).
Company sources revealed that the new RP has formed the Committee of Creditors ( CoC ), which also includes the employees. One meeting of CoC was also held last month.
According to union sources, the new RP will first try for reviving the company. If it fails to get a suitable bidder, then the company will ultimately go for liquidation.
The Kolkata bench of NCLT had provided the new RP time till September end for finalising a resolution plan.
A section of employees are hopeful of the revival of the company by Tata Steel.
” We want Tata Steel to take an initiative for taking over the company. In absence of a takeover, liquidation will be the last resort,” said an employee of the ailing company who had completed 25 years of service.
Once a bluechip company Incab was referred to the erstwhile Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction ( BIFR ) in 1999 as it incurred huge losses due to alleged mismanagement and bungling of funds.
The company was admitted for corporate insolvency resolution on August 7, 2019. In the intervening years, attempts were made to revive Incab, which used to make cables for power transmission. A number of companies, including Tata Steel, were interested in its takeover.
In the mid-1990s, Malaysian promoter Leader Universal Berhad Cables took over the company. But, the company started suffering losses and slid deeper in the red and had to be referred to the erstwhile BIFR.
Since then, Incab employees have been deprived of their monthly salary and other benefits. Significantly, this was the second effort to either revive or liquidate the company.
The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal ( NCLAT) in June this year had quashed the liquidation order earlier passed by National Company Law Tribunal’s Kolkata bench.
NCLAT had earlier rejected the company’s liquidation order as it found several flaws in the functioning of the earlier RP Shashi Agarwal, who was removed paving the way for the appointment of Tibrewal as the new RP.
Currently, Incab Industries has in its rolls around 850 – odd employees at the Jamshedpur plant.
The company also has a manufacturing unit at Pune and the headquarter at Kolkata.
EoM
