Sahara Chairman Subrata Roy
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Sahara chief Subrata Roy’s plea seeking more time to deposit remaining Rs 966.80 crore out of Rs 1500 crore by November 11 in Sebi-Sahara account. The apex court also directed the official liquidator to go ahead with the scheduled auction of Sahara’s Aamby Valley property at Mumbai, which is valued at Rs 37, 392 crore.
Rejecting his plea to extend the time until November 11, the top court said Roy was trying to treat the court as “a laboratory” to play with the law. “We are constrained to state that respondent-contemnor in his own way has treated this Court as a laboratory and has made a maladroit effort to play, possibly thinking that he can survive on the ventilator as long as he can,” said the bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra.
“He would have been well advised that a person who goes on a ventilator may not survive for long and, in any case, a time would come when he has to be comatosed. Here comatose takes place as regards the ambitious effort made by the respondent-contemnor,” the bench added.
The court’s directions came after Roy said he had deposited Rs 533.20 crore in the Sebi-Sahara account and wanted to pay the remaining Rs 966.80 crore via cheques dated November 11. The top court also observed that barring “hyperbolic arguments and rhetoric statements” by the Sahara chief, the amount in its entirety has not yet been paid.
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Earlier in July, the court had asked the embattled Sahara chief to deposit Rs 1,500 crore in the SEBI-Sahara account by September 7 and said it may only then contemplate upon his plea seeking 18 months more for making the full repayment of the outstanding amount to be refunded to the investors.
The court, however, said that entertaining post-dated cheques dated November 11 would “tantamount to travesty of justice” and “extending unwarranted sympathy to a person who is indubitably an abuser of the process of law”.
Having spent two years in jail, Roy has been on parole since May 6 last year. He was granted parole for the first time to enable him to attend the funeral of his mother. It has been extended since then. Besides Roy, two other directors — Ravi Shankar Dubey and Ashok Roy Choudhary — were arrested for failure of the group’s two companies to comply with the court’s August 31, 2012 order to return Rs 24,000 crore to their investors.
With PTI inputs
