(1.) This is an application by the sole liquidator of the Bank of Upper India asking me, as the Judge in winding up, to issue an order sanctioning the liquidator bidding for all properties which may be put up for sale at any future time, under execution proceedings taken for the sale of properties under mortgage-decree, which the liquidator may obtain on mortgages given to the bank now in liquidation, and also asking for sanction to bid in the case of those properties which have already been put up for sale, and in which the sales have been set aside, and in which the properties have to be put up for sale again. In the first place I am asked to issue notice to all whom it may concern. Who is meant by that very general phrase I have not the slightest idea, nor has the learned Counsel making the application. He suggests that I should issue notice to all alleged mortgagors, who may be parties to pending suits in which decrees for sale may possibly be granted, or who may hereafter become parties to suits brought by the liquidator as mortgagee.
(2.) I am certainly not going to do anything of the kind. I have never heard before of a roving notice to a large class of persons, who are not parties at all, merely on some hypothetical contingency, which may or may not become a question of practical importance. In the second place, I am of opinion that I have no jurisdiction to make any order giving the liquidator leave to bid. I can, of course, give any direction to him to take such legal steps as he desires to take, in accordance with the general provisions of the law, in a matter in which he is a litigant like any other ordinary litigant, but the granting or refusing of permission to bid at a sale is clearly a matter for the execution Court. Rule 72, Order 21, provides, as originally enacted that no holder of a decree in execution of which property is sold shall, without the express permission of the Court, bid for or purchase the property,
(3.) But these rules in Sch. I are subject to the respective Sigh Courts powers of amendment, and in these provinces Sub-rule 1, Rule 72, no longer exists. Permission is not necessary to a decree-holder in these provinces; but as the execution Court in which this question has been raised is not in these provinces, this point is not very material. What the state of this rule may be in the Punjab, I do not know, because I have no information as to what amendments have been made in the first schedule in the Punjab, but a little reflection will show that the matter must be solely in the jurisdiction of, and governed by, the Execution Court, which is seized of the matter.