The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed market regulator SEBI to auction 86 Sahara properties that are expected to fetch a minimum sum of Rs 20,000 crore that could pave the way for the release of the jailed Sahara chief Subrata Roy. lodged in jail for over two years now, Roy had failed to comply with the court’s earlier direction to repay the money of investors collected under
a debenture scheme launched in 2008-09. The total repayment came to over Rs 30,000 crore, and the failure to pay the same led to Roy’s arrest in March 2014. He was required to pay a sum of Rs 10,000 crore as a minimum guarantee for his release. Of this, Rs 5,000 crore was to be in cash while the remaining amount was to be furnished in the form of a bank guarantee.
On Tuesday, Sahara’s senior counsel Kapil Sibal submitted that Roy had fulfilled the order in part by depositing the cash component but failed to secure a bank guarantee. Sibal said that in the present situation when the economy is down and the Sahara chief is in jail, no bank was ready to offer any guarantee and no buyer was coming forward to risk putting money in real estate which is not fetching returns.
Sibal said the company was willing to allow the court to deal with the 86 properties which had “unencumbered” title deeds and could fetch upto Rs 40,000 crore.
But senior advocate Arvind Datar who represented SEBI pointed out that the valuation certificate presented by Sahara for the 86 properties showed that it was worth only Rs 20,000 crore. He volunteered to verify whether any other list was submitted by Sahara in this regard.
The list supplied by Sahara contains domestic properties and does not include the Amby Valley project in Maharashtra or the iconic hotels owned by Saharas in london and New York. The bench of Chief Justice TS Thakur, Justices AR Dave and AK Sikri directed SEBI as an “exceptional case” to take assistance of an expert agency to help in the auction of the listed properties and generate money towards the Sahara-SEBI Refund account. The auction will be done under the supervision of retired Supreme Court judge BN Agarwal, who is already monitoring the refund made by Sahara to SEBI.
The court asked SEBI to take the circle rate as the offset price for all the properties and sell at a price not less than 90 per cent of the circle rate. In the event the bid for any property is below 90 per cent, SEBI will be required to take consent from the apex court, the court said.
The bench further required SEBI to keep Sahara informed of the sale of properties and even take inputs on fetching a fair price on its properties. At one point, the bench even lost its cool when Sibal raised fingers on the legality of Roy’s arrest, suggesting that such an order was unseen, unheard of in any country or legal jurisdiction. The bench shot back, “Don’t lecture us on this issue. You make an issue of this everytime this case is argued as if we take some sort of pleasure in keeping this man behind bars. We have helped you by giving you full opportunity of hearing. Everytime you say I have assets but don’t pay. Nowhere in the world does a man having Rs 1.87 lakh crore assets tells that he has no money to pay.” The court posted the matter for hearing next on April 27.