On 26 August 2022 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Sundaresh Bhatt, Liquidator of ABG Shipyard v. Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, held that once a moratorium is imposed under Section 14 or Section 33(5) of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, the Customs Act yields to the IBC by force of Section 238. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs retains the power to assess and determine the quantum of customs duty payable, but cannot initiate recovery, sale or confiscation of the corporate debtor's goods during the moratorium; the customs claim must be filed before the IRP or liquidator and ranks in the Section 53 waterfall. A close reading of Chief Justice Ramana's judgment, the spheres-of-operation reasoning and the doctrinal arc through Paschimanchal.
A practitioner-oriented synthesis of the IBC dispositions that have shaped the first half of 2026 — Elegna's reaffirmation of the mandatory-admission threshold, Embassy Developments' clean reversal at the NCLAT Principal Bench, Gokul Aggarwal on the limits of Section 12A withdrawal post-liquidation, Kejriwal on the personal-guarantor invocation question, the Sunil Kumar Jain order on EPFO assessment within the Section 14 moratorium, and the KLSR Infratech costs order. The piece reads them as a coherent doctrinal map of where insolvency law in India stands at mid-2026.
A clean NCLAT ruling on a question that had been quietly bedeviling resolution professionals across the country: can the EPFO continue assessment proceedings during a moratorium under Section 14 of the IBC? The Tribunal has held that it cannot — and that an assessment order passed during CIRP is, accordingly, unenforceable against the corporate debtor.