Is it the end for the Sahara group?
By Rajiv Theodore
NEW DELHI: With mansions replicating the White House and Buckingham Palace, a fleet of private jets and Bentley’s and Rolls Royce’s, Subrata Roy has come a long way emerging from the small dusty town of Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh where he had gone to study engineering as a teenager.
Today, this once gawky boy has not only acquired the flamboyance and an enigmatic aura associated with tycoons, but also New York’s landmark Plaza Hotel and London’s iconic Grosvenor House. This is apart from his business interests worth about $11 billion spanning finance, housing, manufacturing, aviation, media and sports.
But it is only at the age of 65 that Roy has learnt the most critical lesson of his life – all good things have to end, a dead end is another reality of life and that the long arm of the law does not spare anyone.
On Wednesday, the country’s apex court issued an order to arrest the businessman for failing to show up in the court on charges of swindling millions from investors and not repaying the same.
Five years back, two of his financial companies had raised $3.9 billion through bonds which were illegal. Since then the Sahara patriarch, as he is fondly known, has been playing hide and seek with the court and has been fighting shy of appearing in the court.
This time he had reasoned that he had to be by the side of his ailing 92-year-old mother as he was the eldest of her sons and that no amount of private jet-setting could help him dash to Delhi for the court appearance. This is in defiance of the lawyers involved in the case who has pointed out that if Roy delayed the re-payment of investor funds any further then he would surely go to jail.
Would it mean that it would be the end for the Sahara group itself? Maybe not. Sons Sushanto and Seemanto are there to take the empire forward in case of exigencies; they are already deeply embedded into the business.
Moreover, court cases in India are a drag. It all starts with a bang and then they fizzle out and by the time justice is delivered -and there is a big IF to it – the whole episode would have taken a backseat and memories would have become grainy.
Also, the market regulator, SEBI, which had unearthed this scam, cannot do much at this juncture. The capital market watchdog just does not have enough teeth to deal with a problem of this magnitude where millions of investors have to be compensated, and to sell assets, a corporate lawyer told The American Bazaar.
But the sufferers are the investors who had put their money and faith into a growing company which was billed and hyped as one of India’s biggest and greatest.
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