Ex-staff drags L&T to NCLT

Mumbai: A shareholder and former employee of Larsen and Toubro (L&T) has approached the NCLT alleging oppression and mismanagement of employee welfare fund and assets of the company.

However, L&T refuted the claims, terming them as "frivolous" and "baseless".

The petitioner Uday Dixit sought action against the engineering major and its chief A M Naik.

Dixit, in his petition, alleged that the company, which is the only large firm majority-owned by employees, had committed fraud on shareholders and employees.

Denying the allegations, an L&T spokesperson said, "The petitioner has been filing frivolous and baseless cases against L&T and its management in the past few years. The courts have already dismissed five of these cases including the SLP in the Honourable Supreme Court of India in September 2013 and the writ petition in the Honourable High Court, Mumbai in March 2018. L&T will suitably respond to the petition in NCLT."

The petition, filed before the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), claims that L&T had deducted a sum from the salaries of its employees, including the petitioner's, between 2003 and 2008, without taking due consent.

Even though a Memorandum of Settlement regarding wage scale and other payables to workers was signed and given to the workers by the company's union, the deduction of Rs 2,000 per month from the payables to the employees was never reflected in the settlement, the petition claimed.

According to Dixit's petition, employees were verbally informed in a general meeting of the union that some amount would be deducted from their salaries and equity shares of L&T for the deducted amount would be issued to them.

However, employees were given shares of the Employee Welfare Pvt Ltd company.

It can be noted that Dixit, in the 73rd AGM of L&T last month, had questioned the rationale for the board to allow Naik to set a super specialty cancer hospital at the Powai campus in memory of Nirali, Naik's grand-daughter who died of the dreaded disease as a child.

Dixit and a few other shareholders had said the land allotted for the proposed hospital was supposed to be a manufacturing facility of the company till 2019.