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In the first decisive move towards recovering money from defaulters, the beleaguered National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL) has issued notices to 14 for bounced cheques pertaining to settlements estimated at Rs 500 crore.
NSEL said the exchange had issued notices under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, under which directors and company owners were made respondents. It is understood these cheques had bounced after the exchange started collecting post-dated cheques in the first two weeks of August.
The 14 companies are Aastha Minmet India, ARK Imports, Lotus Refineries, Metcore Alloys & Industries, MSR Food Processing, N K Proteins, NCS Sugars, P D Agroprocessors, Sankhya Investments, Shree Radhey Trading Co, Swastik Overseas Corporation, Vimladevi Agrotech, White Water Foods and Yathuri Associates. These defaulters account for 62 per cent of total pay-in receivables of Rs 5600 crore, according to the NSEL website.
As 19 of the 24 members had been declared defaulters, recoveries from them would now be through recovery proceedings by way of sale of commodities in warehouses, sale of assets offered by these members or by payments made by the defaulting members through their own resources, the statement said.
Payments from the defaulters wouldn’t be carried out in a predefined schedule; these would depend on actual receipts of payments. Payments from the five non-defaulting members would continue according to the schedule disclosed earlier. NSEL’s third payout schedule fell short of the target by 91 per cent; it collected only Rs 15 crore so far.
The second settlement had fallen short of the collection target by 90 per cent, while the first fell short of the target by 48 per cent.
To clear the dues of small investors, the exchanged had borrowed Rs 177 crore from its parent company Financial Technologies (India).
