CHANDRASEKHARA AIYAR J.; - (1.) THE Judgment of the court was delivered by
(2.) THESE appeals are by a creditor of six employees in the Tin Plate Co. of India Ltd. who had been adjudged insolvents. The employees are members in a Provident Fund of the Tin Plate Co. and there were amounts standing to their credit in the said Fund. The creditor, Mukti Lal Agarwala, filed applications under section 4 of the Insolvency Act for orders that the amounts standing to the credit of the insolvents in the Provident Fund account were their properties and had vested in the court and were available for distribution amongst the creditors. He sought a direction that the monies may be brought into court. The petitions were directed primarily against the Tin Plate Co. Ltd. and the Trustees of the Provident Fund. They pleaded in answer that the amount standing to the credit of each insolvent in the Provident Fund represented the contributions of the Company and of the employees and that the corpus was a trust fund in the hands of the trustees of the fund; so they were not properties of the insolvents over which they had a disposing power and that they were not debts due to the insolvents. It was said that according to the rules governing the Provident Fund the monies become payable to the employee or any other member of his family only on the happening of certain contingencies' such as retirement, discharge, dismissal or death and that till then no right accrued to the insolvent. It was further urged that the trustees could not be removed from the custody and control of the fund by the Official Receiver. The Insolvency court, which was the court of the District Judge at Purulia, heard the petitions and found on a construction of the rules of the Provident Fund that the monies standing to the credit of A & C accounts in the name of each insolvent was his property over which he had a disposing power and hence they were available for distribution among the creditors under the Insolvency Act.
(3.) THE trustees of the Fund and the Tin Plate Co. carried the matter on appeal to the High court at Patna and the they were successful. THE learned Judges (V. Ramaswami and Sarjoo Prasad, JJ.) held that under the rules governing the Fund the insolvents had no present disposing power over the monies standing to their credit and that the Fund was really vested in the trustees. As the amount involved in the several petitions taken together was over Rs. 20,000.00, the High court granted leave to the creditors to appeal to this court.;