Sahara India claims to have repaid Rs 3,226 crore to depositors

Virendra Singh Rawat

Lucknow / October 13, 2020

Lucknow-based business conglomerate Sahara India has claimed to have repaid more than Rs 3,226 crore to over a million depositors/investors in the last 75 days.

Out of this amount, 2.18 per cent payments were made against requests from the delayed-payments complainants, according to a company press communiqué here.

The delayed-payment complainants are 0.07 per cent of total investors, Sahara India said claiming to have 80 million investors across India.

Besides, Sahara claimed over the last 10 years, it had made maturity payment totalling more than Rs 1.40 trillion to over 57.67 million investors. “Out of this, only around 40 per cent cases are of reinvestment, the rest have been paid in cash,” the statement read. 

Meanwhile, the Group also admitted to delay in payments, attributing it primarily to the “embargo imposed for last 8 years by the Hon’ble Supreme Court. If any money is generated through selling or mortgaging assets of the group (including Co-operatives) or from joint ventures, the same has to be deposited in the Sahara-SEBI account, as per the directives of Hon’ble Supreme Court.”

It claimed the company had to date deposited Rs 22,000 crore, including interest, in the Sahara-SEBI account, whereas, despite giving four rounds of advertisements in 154 newspapers by SEBI in last 8 years across the country, SEBI has repaid only Rs 106.10 crore to the esteemed investors.

“In its last advertisement that was published a year ago, SEBI made it clear that it would not entertain any further claim thereafter. It means that for SEBI there is no claimant left. The only reason that SEBI didn’t receive any further claim was that Sahara Group had already repaid to its esteemed investors. As per the directives of the Hon’ble Supreme Court, this amount of Rs 22,000 crore will eventually come back to Sahara after due verification.”

Meanwhile, Sahara alleged some media reports “are creating the impression that Sahara is in Chit Fund business, which is completely wrong and misleading information. Sahara was never in Chit Fund business, neither in the past nor is in present. Sahara has always worked under the regulatory legal framework.”

Sahara India claimed to possess assets of market value totalling Rs 2.59 trillion and a ‘family’ of 1.4 million workers with more than 5,000 establishments.