Wednesday 11 November 2009 17.00

Venue: Oxford Law Faculty SCR

Organised by Oxford Law Faculty

Speaker: Kristin van Zwieten (University of Oxford)

Abstract This seminar presents the preliminary findings of my investigation into India’s controversial Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions) Act 1985 (SICA), the first part of a doctoral project on corporate insolvency in India. SICA was introduced to better enable the revival of distressed medium and large-scale industrial enterprise, and follows a long history of governmental responses to industrial distress (or ‘sickness’), a pervasive and complex problem with obvious implications for the employees of Indian industry, and for India’s institutional creditors (to whom industry is heavily indebted). SICA has been widely and trenchantly condemned as a legislative failure. The dominant allegation of failure is that SICA’s processes have improperly privileged SICA’s debtors at the expense of institutional creditors. Popular explanations for this allegation of creditor disenfranchisement have focused primarily on SICA's legislative design - on those features that might privilege debtors in their negotiations with creditors - and only secondarily on aspects of SICA's implementation. The preliminary findings of my research suggest that the role of India's legal institutions, and specifically the role of those judicial and quasi-judicial institutions charged with SICA's administration, has been under-estimated in popular accounts. My central claim is that SICA's functionality has been determined more by aspects of SICA's implementation than by SICA’s design, and particularly by a persistent institutional adherence to a revival-oriented philosophy of SICA’s purpose, entrenched by India’s economic liberalisation. The claim that SICA’s functionality has been determined – indeed, effectively stultified – by the quasi-judicial and judicial institutions that administer it is a dramatic one, with clear implications for company law reform projects in India, and for scholarship in the wider fields of law and finance, and law and development.

For more information on this event, please contact: Jennet Batten