Kamani Employees’ Union
Kamani Employees’ Union (KEU)
The Kamani Employees Union won a historical legal victory in March 2009 in obtaining the legal dues of workers prior to liquidation. The relative speed in obtaining the order was largely as a result of the sale of assets through a High Court supervised Asset Sale Committee that comprised both the secured creditors and the union as a result of which secured creditors and the union entered into consent terms whereby for the first time workers were able to obtain their dues outside of winding-up. The union for probably the first time in Indian law was empowered by the Bombay High Court to distribute workers’ dues of all its members who were employed in the closed KMA Limited, in Bombay and Bangalore. The court direction, which bypassed the normal procedure of going through the Official Liquidator, has enabled the union to distribute the dues of nearly 1,100 workers of around Rs.35 crores within a month of the High Court order. Individual amounts in excess of about 25% of the dues of workers are still outstanding due to a small minority of dissenting workers led by the TUCC (AIFB) and adjudication of statutory creditors’ dues.