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The Supreme Court has ordered all other fora, including the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) and the high courts, to stall proceedings in the refund order against Sahara India Parivar. “We are seized of the matter. (There are) no forums left,” judge K S Radhakrishnan said, after more than an hour of heated arguments on Thursday. The court adjourned the proceedings on the contempt petition and other applications filed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to Wednesday, but not before drama in the crowded courtroom.
Tensions ran high, ahead of the hearing on a case between Sahara India Parivar and Sebi in a matter related to the refund of Rs 24,029 crore collected by Sahara India Real Estate and Sahara Housing Invest, especially after recent remarks by the court against the group’s tactics. In August, the apex court had ordered Sahara to pay the money to Sebi, which would refund it to about 29 million Sahara investors. However, Sahara is yet to make the entire payment.
A battery of Sahara group lawyers led by Ram Jethmalani had come well-prepared, with laminated paper cuttings of a recent newspaper report on thousands of ‘Kalawatis’ found in the list of investors provided by the Sahara group. Referring to the news report, Jethmalani alleged an atmosphere of public prejudice was being created in the matter. “The details of the investors were only between us and Sebi. These are being leaked,” he said. The bench, however, wasn’t impressed. “This has been going on for two decades,” Radhakrishnan said, adding, “We are not prejudiced by any paper report.”
The Sahara counsels said this analysis was a sequel to the reference made to Sahara investor Kalawati by judge J S Khehar in his judgment and his remark that the names of investors seemed “fictitious and concocted”. The bench categorically said, “We don’t want to reopen the judgment for any reason. We are not prejudiced by that Kalawati or anything else.”
Responding to the allegations of leaking of data, Sebi counsel Arvind Datar caught the Sahara group off-guard. “We have not leaked any CD to press. We don’t know about Kalawati. But we have 1,433 Anirudh Singhs. Anirudh Singh, son of Hukum Singh, was, on one single day on
September 9, 2012, paid Rs 10,000, 34 times each. This we found in the analysis of data provided by them.”
Datar said, “I don’t have to go any further to prove contempt. The companies have violated the August 31, 2012, Supreme Court order, which clearly stated the money had to be first paid to Sebi, which would then refund it to the investors. However, we have found Sahara Housing Invest has directly refunded Rs 1,374 crore after the order and Sahara India Real Estate refunded Rs 3,374 crore. In all, they have refunded Rs 4,748 crore, in direct violation of my lord’s order.” The Sebi counsel accused Sahara of trying to “indirectly modify the apex court’s order in other fora and dilly-dallying the process of repayment. He also sought all pending petitions be transferred to the apex court.
Aryama Sundaram, appearing for Subrata Roy, the Sahara chief, objected to the move to transfer his appeals in SAT, saying moving SAT was an appellate remedy available to him, as he was not named in the Supreme Court order. But Datar said both Sahara India Parivar and Subrata Roy were named in the Sebi order and their names didn’t figure in the apex court’s order only because they had not moved the apex court in an appeal against the Sebi order. “They preferred not to appeal. Now, they cannot come up and say we are a third party.”
