Tribunal Halts Fire Sale of Byju’s Assets as Fraud Allegations Engulf the Resolution Professional

Bengaluru — For two years, Byju Raveendran has been cast as the villain of India’s most-watched corporate collapse. Last week, a courtroom in Bengaluru told a different story.

The National Company Law Tribunal’s Bengaluru Bench has ordered a complete freeze on assets auctioned off by Shailendra Ajmera of EY, the Resolution Professional (RP) of Think and Learn Private Limited (TLPL) — the parent company of Byju’s — after being told in open court that articles worth approximately Rs 150 crore had been sold for approximately Rs 16 crore. Roughly ten paise on the rupee.

The order, dated 31 August 2026, directs both Mr. Ajmera and the auction buyer, Comprint Tech Solutions (I) Private Limited, to maintain status quo over every article sold under the 2 August auction notice, preserved “in their existing state” until the Tribunal hears the matter again on 21 September.

“A fraud being played by the RP”

The language used before the Tribunal was not the careful hedging of ordinary insolvency practice. Ms. Manasi Kumar, appearing for the Resolution Professional of Byju’s K3 Education Private Limited, told the Bench her company faced “a complete state of asset deprivation, all because of a fraud being played by the RP of a holding company.”

The memo filed before the Tribunal goes further. It states that by withholding a list of assets dated 17 December 2024 — a document in Mr. Ajmera’s possession all along — “the Respondent is guilty of suppressing a material document from the Hon’ble Tribunal. It is settled law that suppression of a material document amounts to fraud and fraud vitiates everything.”

This is the same insolvency machinery that was supposed to protect creditors and revive the company. Instead, the applicant argued, the continued dissipation of assets could leave Byju’s K3 without the assets needed to run its own resolution process at all.

A four-day auction that “reeks of mala fides”

Senior Advocate Joy Saha, appearing for the suspended directors, put the timeline to the Bench bluntly: a sale concluded “within a magnificent period of 4 days … reeks of mala fides, reeks.”

His legal argument was equally direct. Regulation 29 of the insolvency regulations permits an RP to sell assets only on a reasoned finding that the sale is necessary for better realisation of value. “Where is this finding? And if there is no finding, there cannot be a sale.”

And under Section 18(1)(f) of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, a Resolution Professional may take control only of assets the corporate debtor actually owns — third-party goods are expressly excluded. “It is the RP who has to show that the assets which he is selling are the assets of the corporate debtor,” Saha submitted. The RP’s position, he argued, inverts that burden entirely: “I will sell because you can’t show you are the owner.”

The Tribunal appeared to share the concern. The Bench of Judicial Member Sunil Kumar Aggarwal and Technical Member Radhakrishna Sreepada observed: “Even if part of the auctioned articles actually belonged to TLPL, the ownership of rest of the articles remains in haze.” Preservation, the Bench held, was necessary until concrete evidence emerged — because an altered ground situation could not be undone.

The buyer, dragged into the dock

The Tribunal did not stop at Mr. Ajmera. It made Comprint — the successful bidder in the 14 August auction — a respondent to the proceedings, and ordered it to file, within one week of service, a detailed inventory of everything it purchased, the complete address where the goods are stored, and photographs. A copy goes to the applicant’s counsel.

Mr. Ajmera, meanwhile, was directed to comply with the Tribunal’s earlier order of 20 August — an order the applicant complained had simply been ignored. His counsel asked for more time to “collate the data.”

Why this matters for the Byju Raveendran story

The suspended directors’ counsel made a point that has been buried under two years of hostile headlines: TLPL’s insolvency process was meant to revive the company, not strip it for parts at a fraction of value.

The questions now before the Tribunal are the questions Raveendran’s side has been asking all along. Who at EY’s insolvency practice signed off on a fire sale at 10% of claimed value, in four days, without the reasoned finding the law requires? Why was a December 2024 asset list withheld from the Tribunal? Whose assets were actually sold?

Mr. Ajmera maintains that the goods were T&L’s, that the sale was approved by its Committee of Creditors, and that Byju’s K3 has established no title. The Tribunal has decided none of these questions yet. But it has done something it does not do lightly: it has frozen the field, brought the buyer into the proceedings, and demanded disclosure — because the allegations were serious enough that the situation on the ground could not be allowed to change.

The proceedings follow a Karnataka High Court order of 28 August 2026 that cleared the path for the application. The matter will next be heard on 21 September 2026.

For a founder who built India’s most valuable startup and then watched it dismantled around him, the courtroom record is starting to ask a new question — not what Byju Raveendran did wrong, but what was done to the company he built.

Based on the NCLT Bengaluru Bench order dated 31 August 2026 in I.A. No. 768/2026 in C.P. (IB) No. 29/BB/2025, the order dated 28 August 2026, and transcripts of court proceedings.