An international realty firm has come up with an offer of about Rs 4,000 crore ($550 million) to buy Sahara’s stake in New York’s Plaza hotel. MG Capital Holdings llC, which made the offer before the Supreme Court during the hearing on the contempt petition against Sahara for failing to deposit an outstanding sum of over Rs 10,000 crore, was told by a three-judge SC Bench to deposit a sum of Rs 750 crore as earnest money with the court by April 10 to prove the bona fides of its offer.
The court also warned that any attempt to withdraw the offer will result in the forfeiture of the earnest money.
On Tuesday, Sahara submitted a list of 15 properties, which were free from all encumbrances, to be put to auction and claimed them to be worth over Rs 6,715 crore. The Bench of Justices Dipak Misra, Ranjan Gogoi and AK Sikri gave Sahara time till April 17 to sell any of the 15 listed items and deposit the sale proceeds with the SEBI-Sahara refund account.
SEBI senior counsel Arvind Datar pointed out that one of the listed items involved Sahara’s stake in Orange India that owns Force India, the Formula One racing team worth about Rs 510 crore. This item was removed from the list of auction. Another item on the list was a big stretch of 91.65 acre in Ghaziabad that was acquired from Sahara by the Ghaziabad Development Authority (GDA). In lieu, the GDA has to award the company a sum of Rs 1,112.70 crore with interest. The court also removed this item from the list of properties to be put up for auction and issued notice to the GDA to compute the total amount payable to Saharas. The court directed the remaining Rs 5,092.64 crore to be raised from auction of the remaining 13 properties, including Sahara Hospital at lucknow, to be deposited within six weeks.
Sahara’s request for six months time to deal with its properties was rejected by the Court. Saharas also produced another category of encumbered properties, but the court did not allow the same to be auctioned as several properties were either under attachment or mortgaged.