MUMBAI: India’s top court has ordered the liquidation of bankrupt airline Jet Airways, ending a five-year-long legal process that began when the full-service carrier collapsed in 2019 with $1.2 billion in debt.

Once the country’s second-largest airline, Jet Airways stopped operating five years ago after it ran out of cash and its planes were grounded, with lenders forcing it into bankruptcy proceedings the same year.

A national company law tribunal last year allowed ownership of the airline to be transferred to a consortium of buyers that included UAE-based businessman Murari Lal Jalan as part of the bankruptcy resolution process.

But concerns raised by lenders over how the resolution process was executed led to court appeals.

India’s Supreme Court overturned the ownership transfer on Thursday, saying the consortium had not met legal conditions for a takeover and to allow the buyout to proceed would be “perverse and unsustainable in law”.

The court also decreed that a bankruptcy court in Mumbai should begin “necessary formalities for commencement of liquidation”, a process that will see sale of the airline’s assets.

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The world’s most populous country’s aviation sector is fiercely competitive and several airlines have run aground because of some combination of poor management, overleveraging and adverse market conditions.

Debt-laden Indian budget airline Go First filed for bankruptcy protection last year, blaming “faulty” engines from US aerospace company Pratt & Whitney for the grounding of about half its fleet.

Kingfisher Airlines closed in 2012 after it failed to repay loans worth millions of dollars to state-owned banks.

Its owner, beer tycoon Vijay Mallya, fled India four years later and is battling his extradition from London to face financial fraud charges back home.