The foundational Indian application of the Salomon principle — a shareholder owns shares, not the company's property, and the agricultural character of a tea company's income does not pass through to dividends in the shareholder's hands.
A three-judge bench laid down a strict, impropriety-based six-fold test for piercing the corporate veil, holding that canteen workers engaged through a wholly-owned subsidiary were not workmen of the parent company.
A five-judge Constitution Bench delivered a foundational statement on separate corporate personality, the narrow grounds for lifting the corporate veil, and the shareholder's right to requisition a meeting irrespective of motive.
On 5 May 2026 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Alpha Corp Development Pvt Ltd v. Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority, authorised the lifting of the corporate veil during the CIRP of a holding company so that the land assets held by its SPV subsidiaries — which had been used by the group to shield real-estate landbanks from homebuyer claims — could be drawn into the resolution estate. Decided on the factual matrix of the Earth Infrastructures group and producing relief for over 4,200 homebuyers, the ruling is the first clear apex pronouncement that the corporate-separateness principle can be lifted in real-estate insolvencies where the multi-SPV structure has been used to defeat the substantive resolution objective. A close reading of the bench's reasoning, the Article 142 architecture, and what the ruling means for SPV-structured developers, homebuyer associations, and the 2026 RERA-IBC recalibration.