Discount broking firm Samco Securities to face insolvency proceedings

Discount broking firm Samco Securities will face corporate insolvency resolution process after the NCLT admitted the insolvency petition filed by one of its vendors — Gupshup Technology India Pvt Ltd. As per the order of the NCLT, Samco Securities defaulted on a payment of Rs 1.04 crore due to Gupshup Technology, which claims itself to be the world’s leading conversational messaging platform for commerce, marketing and support.

Gupshup Technology and Samco Securities entered into a service agreement on 13 June 2019 wherein the latter agreed to avail the messaging services by way of SMS/Whatsapp/smart messaging services etc provided by the former. The operational creditor – Gupshup – in its petition had alleged that Corporate Debtor (Samco) failed to clear the dues/outstanding towards invoices dated 31 January 2022 to 1 July 2022.

The operational creditor claimed that as per the terms of the invoices and services agreement, the payments were to be made within 15 days from the date of invoice failing the said payments were subject to the interest calculated 18% per annum. Accordingly, the date on which the debt fell due is 15 days from the date of individual invoice and the last payment from the Corporate Debtor against the invoices pending prior to the amounts claimed under present application was received on 23 June 2022. The amount of debt claimed by Gupshup was Rs 1.6 crore including the interest.

The Operational Creditor accordingly issued a demand notice on 05 December 2022. The Corporate Debtor on its part, however said that there were disputed regarding defaulted amount.

Samco Securities disputed Gupshup’s claim that there was anything in the agreement about payment of interest in case of delay in payment. It also raised the issue of undelivered SMSes and text messages. The corporate debtor also raised the issue of being overcharged for the messaging services.

The operational creditor argued before the NCLT that even if it is admitted for the sake of argument that there were no delivery of SMS’s to the tune of 18,751,878 and if the same is subtracted from the total SMS’s sent for January, 2022 then it works out to 8,55,83,858 SMS’s for the said month and if the same is multiplied by 10.5 paise, as is the case of the Corporate Debtor, then after adding maintenance fees, notifications, CGST, SGST the amount payable even as per Corporate Debtor for the month of January works out to 1.06 crore. This calculation sheet also includes the invoices for the month of February, March, April, May, June, 2022 and the amounts respectively which is also disputed by the Corporate Debtor. The total amount for the month of February, 2022 to June, 2022 works out to Rs 159,849.5. If this amount is also subtracted from the amount payable from the month of January 2022, then it comes to Rs 1.04 crore.

NCLT went with the argument of the operational creditor, agreed to existence of the defaulted amount of Rs 1.04 crore and admitted the insolvency plea against Samco Securities.

Samco Securities Limited is a wealth tech start-up rebranded in 2015 by Jimeet Modi, group CEO. It is headquartered in Mumbai and has over 2,50,000 customers. Samco Securities Limited is also the sponsor of Samco Mutual Funds, which manages around Rs 1,400 crore investors’ money.

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