A diagnostic centre's CT scanner has ended up in the hands of a court-appointed receiver, after its owner kept the machine running on borrowed money he stopped repaying. The Bombay High Court, on 19 October 2026, directed a Court Receiver to take physical possession of the equipment and hand it over to Siemens Financial Services Private Limited for safekeeping while an arbitration over the unpaid loan runs its course.
The borrower, Nadeem Ahmad Khandey, had taken a loan of Rs. 1.05 crore from Siemens under a finance agreement dated 19 December 2023 to buy a medical imaging system described in the agreement as a Somatom Go Now Compact, along with accessories. The loan was structured to be repaid over 72 months at 11.50% annual interest, with the machine itself hypothecated to Siemens as security, the standard arrangement in equipment finance where the asset being bought also backs the loan used to buy it.
Khandey stopped keeping up the payments, and Siemens eventually recalled the loan and invoked arbitration on 13 May 2026. By its own calculation, as of 2 June 2026 it was owed about Rs. 1,22,61,244, with default interest running at 36% per annum from 3 June. Tellingly, Khandey himself had already conceded the position was untenable. On 23 February 2026, well before the arbitration notice went out, he issued a letter saying he was willing to surrender the machine because he could not regularise the loan account. He never actually handed it over.
That gap between the offer and the handover is what brought Siemens to the High Court. With the loan recalled and arbitration invoked but the underlying machinery still sitting with a defaulting borrower who had already said he could not pay, Siemens moved under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, on 8 July 2026, asking the court to protect the equipment while the dispute was arbitrated. Section 9 exists precisely for this kind of gap: it lets a party secure the subject matter of a dispute before or during arbitral proceedings, so that whatever the tribunal eventually decides is not rendered pointless by the asset disappearing, being sold, or being run into the ground in the meantime.
Justice Borkar's order is careful to say what it is not. It is not a finding of fraud, and it does not record any proved attempt by Khandey to defeat the arbitration. Instead, the court grounded the receiver's appointment in three plainer facts: the equipment was contractually hypothecated to Siemens as security, the borrower had defaulted repeatedly, and he had failed to hand over possession despite his own written offer to do so. On that basis, preserving the machine through a neutral receiver, rather than leaving it with a borrower who had already admitted he could not service the debt, was the only way to keep the dispute meaningful until the arbitrator rules on the merits.
The receiver is to take physical possession and hand the equipment to Siemens for custody, but the order stops short of letting Siemens sell, auction, transfer or dismantle it. That distinction matters. Interim protection under Section 9 preserves an asset; it does not convert a secured lender into an owner free to liquidate the collateral before the underlying dispute over the exact amount due, the correctness of the default interest rate, or any defence Khandey might still raise has actually been decided by the arbitrator. Siemens gets custody and the comfort that the machine will not vanish or be stripped for parts; it does not get to skip the arbitration and recover its money by selling the scanner outright.
For equipment financiers and the hospitals, diagnostic chains and clinics that borrow against costly machinery, the order is a reminder of how the two halves of an equipment loan dispute typically play out. The arbitrator decides what is owed and on what terms; the court's job under Section 9, in the meantime, is narrower and more practical, making sure the machine that secures the debt is still there, intact and in a known pair of hands, by the time that decision comes.