New Delhi: It now seems there is more than what meets the eye in the Indiabulls Housing Finance Ltd versus Subhash Chandra case, where a last week’s order by a single member of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) resulted in such an uproar that the NCLT president had to constitute an unprecedented five-member bench to stay the order.The bench, presided over by NCLT president Justice Anupinder Singh Grewal, today (September 1) stayed the August 25 order.The other members on the bench included Bachu Venkat Balaram Das, Mahendra Khandelwal, Atul Chaturvedi and Ravindra Chaturvedi.A perusal of the detailed order by the five-member bench makes for interesting reading.The order says that, on September 3, 2025, a two-member bench comprising Ashok Kumar Bhardwaj and Reena Sinha Puri delivered dissenting judgments in the case.While Bhardwaj, member (judicial), approved the repayment plan, holding that dissenting financial creditors having participated in the voting process could resort to the “remedies available to them under the law for recovery of their remaining debt,” Sinha Puri, member (technical), rejected the repayment plan by holding that there were various “irregularities in the process including those relating to the admission of claims and voting”.It was left to then NCLT president Justice Ramalingam Sudhakar to appoint a third member to break the logjam.However, surprisingly, he took almost five months to refer the matter to a third member.While the matter was placed before him on September 25, 2025, he decided to refer the difference of opinion to Nilesh Sharma, member (judicial), NCLT Mumbai bench, on February 5 this year.Sharma approved the repayment plan. However, he qualified his approval by directing exclusion of the claims submitted on behalf of 1260 individuals from the final list of creditors. He ordered that, as a consequence, there would be redistribution of the amount allocated to them amongst the remaining eligible creditors.More importantly, he also held that the approved Repayment Plan would be binding upon all the creditors, whether assenting or dissenting to the Repayment Plan.It remains to be seen what explanation, if any, the previous NCLT president gave for the delay in appointing a third member and for appointing one from the Mumbai bench, and not New Delhi, where the proceedings had taken place.Today the five-member bench, while issuing notices to all the parties, also restrained Chandra from directly or indirectly selling or alienating any of his properties till further orders.The order by a single member, who had accepted Chandra’s plea to settle the personal guarantee to the loans taken by his group company by paying a measly Rs 6.5 crore out of the total admitted liability of over Rs 22,000 crore, had led to a massive uproar.Chandra has claimed that while he had not personally borrowed Rs 22,000 crore from banks or financial institutions, including PSU institutions, the amount referred to personal guarantees given by him for loans taken by various borrowing entities.Adding to the controversy was the fact that some of the lenders who voted in favour of settling the debt by accepting a pittance traced their origin to companies owned or managed by his close relatives.