India's Fallen Billionaires

How a dozen leading Indian businessmen lost their crown jewels to unsustainable debt

- Nevin John

4,300 Number of companies taken to NCLT for loan default

In the second week of March, Venugopal Dhoot, 69, who built India’s first homegrown consumer durables company, Videocon Industries Ltd (VIL), looked distraught while walking out of a PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Act) court in Mumbai. The court granted him bail but asked him to surrender his passport.

Dhoot, whose personal wealth was $1 billion-plus in 2015, has lost all major businesses — consumer durables, telecom, oil exploration — to insolvency. In August 2019, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) consolidated resolution processes for all 13 group companies, which had total admitted claims of ₹64,838 crore. In October 2020, the Dhoot family offered lenders ₹30,000 crore to withdraw the insolvency proceedings. But the creditors decided to sell the assets to a Vedanta group company, Twin Star Technologies, for ₹2,962 crore, taking a haircut of over 95 per cent. However, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) stayed the bid.

Dhoot is among the hundreds of Indian businessmen who have lost their companies after the introduction of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) in 2016. The code replaced complex corporate insolvency laws and mandated strict resolution timelines. Lenders have so far taken over 4,300 companies to NCLT for loan default.