SC grants Subrata Roy some respite

The Supreme Court today granted Sahara chief Subrata Roy 15 more working days to wind up negotiations to sell his overseas properties.

The lawyer representing the Sahara group, Gaurav Bhatia said, "An interim application (IA) was moved by Subrata Roy and two other applicants, requesting for an extension of the permission that was given by the Supreme Court on August 1, 2014, allowing the three applicants to be shifted to the Tihar court complex which has a conference room from where video-conferencing can be done with secretarial staff. Material was placed before the honourable Supreme Court and mentioned in the IA regarding all the concrete steps that has been taken in the last few days after this permission was given. Using the same, the Supreme Court has extended the permission for another 15 working days from August 20."

"Considerable progress has been made in relation to the three overseas properties and also in relation to bank guarantees that has to be furnished. The three applicants will continue to be in the court complex where there is a conference room" he added.

Earlier, on August 1, the apex court had allowed Roy and two directors of his group to use the conference room in Tihar jail complex for 10 days with effect from August 5 to hold negotiations with potential buyers.

The court, while refusing to grant interim bail or parole, had allowed selling of his luxury hotels

in order to enable the Sahara chief to hold negotiations for selling his properties in India and abroad to raise Rs 10,000 crore in order to get a regular bail.

Roy, who was sent to jail on March 4 this year for non- refund of over Rs 20,000 crore to depositors, was asked by the court to pay Rs 10,000 crore for getting bail, out of which Rs 5,000 crore must be in cash and rest of the amount should be in the form bank guarantee.

Sahara has so far raised Rs 3,117 crore, which has been deposited with SEBI.

The group, however, claims that it has already repaid money to 93 percent investors.