India News | Arbitral Award Row: SC Issues Notice to DAMEPL on DMRC Contempt Plea

New Delhi, Dec 11 (PTI) The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a notice to the Delhi Airport Metro Express Pvt Ltd (DAMEPL), a subsidiary of Reliance Infrastructure Limited, on a contempt plea alleging failure on its part to refund over Rs 4,500 crore along with interest to the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC).

A bench comprising Justices Surya Kant, Dipankar Datta and Ujjal Bhutan took note of the plea of the DMRC and sought response from DAMEPL as to why contempt proceedings be not initiated against it for not paying the money along with interest to the public carrier.

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The bench has posted the contempt plea for hearing on January 20, 2025.

On April 10, the top court set aside its own judgement and held that the PSU firm was not obliged to pay over Rs 8,000 crore to the DAMEPL in pursuance of a 2017 arbitral award.

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Allowing the curative plea of the DMRC against the 2021 judgement, a special bench headed by the then Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud held that the top court erred in setting aside the Delhi High Court verdict.

A division bench of the Delhi High Court, in 2019, set aside the arbitral award passed against the DMRC.

The top court asked DAMEPL to return about Rs 2,500 crore it had already received, holding the previous verdict had caused "grave miscarriage of injustice" to a public utility which was saddled with an exorbitant liability.

It had said the order of the Delhi High Court division bench was a "well-considered decision" and "there was no valid basis" for the Supreme Court to interfere with it.

The interference by the apex court, in its earlier decisions, resulted in restoring a patently illegal award, it said.

"The Division Bench applied the correct test in holding that the arbitral award suffered from the vice of perversity and patent illegality. The findings of the Division Bench were borne out from the record and were not based on a mis-appreciation of law or fact. This Court failed, while entertaining the SLP under Article 136, to justify its interference with the well-considered decision of the Division Bench of the High Court," it had said.

The 2017 arbitral award was to the tune of Rs 7,200 crore and the amount along with the interest and other charges swelled up to over Rs 8,000 crore.

The top court, on February 20, reserved its verdict on the curative plea of the DMRC against the dismissal of its review petition against the arbitral award to the tune of Rs 8,000 crore in favour of the DAMEPL.

The DAMEPL had termed the curative plea of the DMRC against the top court's decisions as the “whole-sale trial by ambush”.

The appeal and the review petitions of the DMRC, challenging the arbitral award asking it to pay Rs 8,000 crore to DAMEPL, were dismissed by the top court earlier.

The DMRC challenged the arbitral award on grounds, including that the notice of October 8, 2012 issued by DAMEPL terminating the concessionaire agreement related to running the airport metro line in the national capital was “illegal”.

The DMRC had filed the curative plea in August, 2022, against the dismissal of its review plea by the top court in 2021.

After the dismissal of the plea of DMRC, the Reliance firm moved the Delhi High Court seeking execution of the arbitral award.

In May, 2017, an arbitral tribunal ruled in favour of the DAMEPL, which had pulled out of running the Airport Express metro line over safety issues, and accepted its claim that running the operations on the line was not viable due to structural defects in the viaduct through which the trains would pass.

Earlier, the court had noted that the total amount of the award with interest till February 14, 2022 was Rs 8,009.38 crore. Of this, a sum of Rs 1,678.42 crore has been paid by the DMRC and an amount of Rs 6,330.96 crore is still due.

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