Sahara to move SC before submitting fresh title deeds

Sahara India Pariwar chief Subrata Roy on Friday said the company would move the Supreme Court regarding the submission of fresh title deeds to market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India.

"We want to submit the title deeds directly to the nationalised banks and not to Sebi for which the company would seek nod from the Supreme Court. We are now going to approach the apex court for an order so that we can submit all the documents to banks and not to Sebi," Roy told reporters in Kolkata.

Sahara India was required to submit the title deeds of Rs 20,000 crore (Rs 200 billion) to the marker regulator as per direction of the Supreme Court.

Sahara India had earlier submitted title deeds of similar amount to Sebi but the latter rejected them on grounds that they were overvalued.

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"The market regulator is not fair to us. We want to do this because we want to save time," Roy said.     

He said out of the required Rs 24,000 crore (Rs 240 billion) which it was asked to pay back to depositors, only Rs 2,500 crore (Rs 25 billion) was left unpaid.

"We are all ready with the papers. We will move the Supreme Court before December 11," Roy said.

He said the nationalised banks would issue trustee securities which some of them had already agreed.

Asked to comment about the action by the regulator, he said: "The reasons are political.

"I am a very emotional person.

"At some point of time I had said that an India's PM should be an Indian," he said.

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To a query, he said that Sahara's assets (movable and immovable) aggregated Rs 1.20 lakh crore (Rs 1.2 trillion) and was in a comfortable financial position.

Sahara's public deposits as of now stood at Rs 35,000 crore (Rs 350 billion) and yearly collection as a cooperative business was around Rs 12,000 crore (Rs 120 billion) annually.

Roy said the company would shortly hire 48,000 executives and 250,000 salaried staff in the next two-and-a-half years, in addition to the existing 11 lakh (1.1 million) workers.

Questioned about the succession issue, he said that the company would be run by a trust in future.

The company planned to enter the fields of education and health as well. In the next eight to ten years, the expected revenue of Sahara would be around Rs 18 lakh crore (Rs 18 trillion), he said.

In 2008, the Reserve Bank of India banned Sahara as a Residuary Non-Banking Company and prohibited it from collecting deposits.

But the company raised Rs 24,000 crore (Rs 240 billion) through two companies, Sahara Housing and Sahara India Real Estate through floating optionally fully convertible debentures.