A dispute over invoices worth less than three crore rupees put one of India's largest wire and cable manufacturers briefly inside the insolvency process, before the appellate tribunal pulled it back out again within two days. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal has stayed an NCLT Ahmedabad order admitting Polycab India Limited into Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process on a Section 9 petition filed by Asier Metals.
Asier Metals had approached the NCLT Ahmedabad Bench under Section 9 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, alleging an operational debt default by Polycab. Reports differ slightly on the exact figure, with most putting it at around Rs 2.79 crore and at least one source citing Rs 2.78 crore. The NCLT admitted the petition and commenced CIRP against Polycab, a decision the company moved immediately to challenge on appeal.
Polycab's defence to the underlying claim rests on how its invoicing worked. The company says the disputed invoices were marked 'Provisional Billing' and remained subject to final pricing, reconciliation, quantity discounts, credit notes, and other adjustments, meaning the amount Asier Metals claimed as due was never a fixed, undisputed sum in the first place. The NCLT, in admitting the petition, evidently found no pre-existing dispute of the kind that would have barred admission under the settled Mobilox standard for operational debt claims.
The NCLAT's Principal Bench in New Delhi took a different initial view, at least for the purpose of granting interim relief. It stayed the NCLT's admission order, putting the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process in abeyance pending the appeal's final hearing. The stay was not unconditional. Polycab was directed to deposit the full amount claimed in the petition, by way of fixed deposit in the name of the NCLAT Registrar, within one week, without prejudice to either side's case on the merits. The appeal itself is listed for hearing on 26 October 2026.
The commercial consequences moved faster than the legal proceedings. Because the CIRP admission had already triggered an IBC-linked event, the stock exchanges' derivatives framework treated Polycab's shares for exclusion from futures and options trading, with existing contracts running out by 30 December 2026 and no fresh F&O contracts to follow. The NCLAT's stay of the insolvency order does not automatically reverse that exchange action, since the derivatives exclusion is anchored to the IBC-linked event having occurred at all, not to whether the underlying order survives appeal. Polycab's shares remain freely tradeable in the ordinary cash market throughout.
The episode is a pointed illustration of how disproportionate the consequences of an IBC admission can be relative to the amount actually in dispute. A claim of under three crore rupees, against a listed company with a market capitalisation running into tens of thousands of crores, was enough to trigger a formal insolvency admission, a stock exchange derivatives exclusion, and an emergency appellate stay, all within a matter of days. For operational creditors and corporate debtors alike, the case shows why genuine, well-documented disputes over an invoice's finality, such as Polycab's provisional-billing defence, need to be raised and substantiated at the admission stage itself, since an NCLT that finds no pre-existing dispute will admit the petition regardless of the debtor's subsequent appellate prospects.
Whether Polycab's provisional-billing argument persuades the NCLAT on full hearing remains to be seen at the 26 October listing. For now, the conditional deposit requirement means Polycab is out roughly Rs 2.79 crore in locked-up funds either way, win or lose on the stay, while the underlying question of whether its invoices were genuinely disputed sits for full argument before the appellate bench.
Listed companies watching this dispute for their own governance purposes should take note of how quickly the exchange-level consequences of an IBC admission can outrun the legal proceedings generating them. A stay obtained within forty-eight hours of an adverse order still left Polycab facing a derivatives exclusion that no appellate relief, however swiftly granted, could unwind, simply because the triggering event under the exchange's own rules had already occurred the moment the NCLT passed its admission order.