SAHARA- SUPREME COURT VERDICT

3 SEP, 2012, 07.15AM IST, ET BUREAU 

Sahara investors: Supreme Court not convinced by name and addresses given by company

MUMBAI: Who is Kalawati? Does she exist? What's her real address? These are questions that India's highest court has pondered over to stoke an old suspicion that millions have harboured about Sahara.
''Kalawati' is a name that figures in the long list of investors who subscribed to convertible debenturesissued by the Sahara companies that are under scanner.
She is a 'resident' of Uchahara, SK Nagar, UP, and the agent who brought in the investment of Rs 1,600 is Haridwar of Bani Road, Sant Kabir Nagar. The innocuous information appears on the first page of the voluminous compilation of Sahara's investor details that was presented to the Supreme Court.
But the court was not convinced to go beyond page 1.
Instead, the court, while directing two Sahara companies to refund thousands of crores, has made some obvious observations: it's unclear whether Kalawati is a member of the Sahara group or its associates, or related to Sahara employees; her parentage and husband's name is not disclosed; and the address is of general description with no street name or door number. Also, as a name, 'Hardiwar' is incomprehensible: in India, cites do not constitute the basis of individual names, said the court.
It's a suspicion that Sahara has to counter if it has to survive. This could well be the reason that drove the group to come out with full page advertisements over the weekend. Mentioned in capital letters, the ad claims that "there is not a single benami money and this statement is Sahara's challenge to all authorities of our country". Two Sahara companies have been asked to pay back Rs 17,400 crore along with 15% interest, failing which the capital market regulator Sebi can initiate legal proceedings to seize Sahara's assets and freeze bank accounts to recover funds.
"One would not like to make any unrealistic remark, but there is no other option but to record, that the impression emerging from the analysis of the single entity extracted above is that the same seems totally unrealistic and may well be fictitious, concocted and made up," said the court. It felt that many transactions are not expected to be casual, certainly not in the manner expressed by the two companies.
Interestingly, Sahara India Real Estate Corp, which raised bulk of the funds, had cash and bank balances of Rs 6.7 lakh and net current assets of Rs 6.54 lakh as on 31 December 2007. Together with Sahara Housing Investment Corp - the company that has been asked to refund investors - have raised as much as Rs 40,000 crore so far through issuance of optionally fully convertible debentures. Till August 2011, the two entities had collected 24,029 crore (net of premature redemptions) from 2.9 crore investors. Now, Sebi has the humongous task of ascertaining the genuineness of the investors as well as the amount deposited by them.

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