Hopes dimmed for Sahara chief’s early release from jail as the Supreme Court on Tuesday lashed out at Subrata Roy for targeting the court instead of complying with its orders to make repayment of sums promised to be paid to SEBI at regular intervals.
Dismissing his petition where he accused judges of “bias” after they ordered his detention in jail on March 4 this year, the Bench of Justices KS Radhakrishnan and JS Khehar said, “Calculated psychological offensives and mind games adopted to seek recusal of judges need to be strongly repulsed.” With the case having consumed 81 days and thousands of court hours of work, the Bench urged the legislature to formulate a mechanism to ensure that “senseless and ill-considered claims” were punished with heavy costs to act as a deterrent against such litigants that results in loss of judicial time.
The two Sahara firms - Sahara Real Estate and Sahara Housing - which had collected over `20,000 crore by way of debentures from open market, was red-flagged by market regulator SEBI, which sought repayment of the said sum. The matter travelled from SEBI to Securities Appellate Tribunal and finally in Supreme Court and successive attempts to make the Sahara firms repay the money failed.
Although Sahara, in a statement issued on Tuesday, claimed that 93 per cent of the money was repaid to investors by way of cash payments, the bench refuted such claim. It said, “Sole reliance on general ledger entries without any other authentication, has been held to be insufficient proof of the refunds claimed to have been made by the two companies to the investors, specially because, such cash redemptions have not been affirmed in the certificate issued by the firm of Chartered Accountants, who audited the accounts of the two companies.”
As of now, the court noted that the amount payable by Sahara swelled to `36,608 crore. In December 2012, the court directed them to deposit an initial sum of `10,000 crore, which had not been paid till date. “Acceptance of the proposals is just not possible, in the teeth of the order dated December 5, 2012, passed by a three-Judge Division Bench, requiring the two companies to make a deposit of `10,000 crore in the first week of January, 2013. By now, about 17 further months have elapsed without the petitioner and the two companies having made any deposit whatsoever.” It allowed Sahara to move a fresh proposal.