July 18 may be marked in history when India decided to call the bluff of big corporations and constrained them to pay back the money they had siphoned off from banks. As reported earlier by Indianmandarins, SBI and Standard Chartered Bank on Tuesday independently filed applications before the Ahmedabad branch of NCLT for initiating insolvency proceedings against Essar, after the company's outstanding dues hovered over Rs34,000 crore. The company has its 6.8 MTPA steel plant at Hazira, Gujarat. However, Essar Steel sought more time to file its objections to the insolvency petition filed by the two banks. The single-judge Bench, chaired by Justice Bikki Raveendra Babu, allowed the company time till July 22 to file its objections and placed the next hearing on the matter on July 24. In a similar development, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) admitted the insolvency proceedings against Monnet Ispat and Energy after the lenders led by SBI confirmed the default amount to be Rs1,539 crore. Monnet Ispat and Essar Steel are two of the 12 defaulting companies prioritized by the RBI for proceedings under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). The NCLT may take up almost all the cases over the next few weeks. The Tribunal wants to close the cases quickly. Meanwhile, India Ratings said banks will have to make an additional provision of Rs18,000 crore on the 12 accounts referred to the NCLT. A bankruptcy court has ruled that a promoter cannot escape the liquidation of personal assets by filing for bankruptcy.