The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Sahara Group to choose and sell any parcel of its property in its Aamby Valley project in Maharashtra by May 15 and deposit the money in the SEBI-Sahara Refund Account.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice A.K. Sikri said the Sahara Group has time till May 15 to sell the properties and if it fails, the Bombay High Court’s official liquidator will proceed with the proposed auctioning process to sell the property.
The court posted the matter for further hearing on May 15.
Spread over 8,900 acres, the Aamby Valley property is to be sold by splitting it into saleable parcels of land as there were no takers for the purchase of the entire Valley.
In its report, the official liquidator said the procedure for auctioning the Aamby Valley property has commenced and bids will be invited from May 21 to 31 and the auction will begin from June 2.
Earlier, the top court directed the auction of Aamby Valley to recover money that the Sahara group has to pay to the market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for returning investors’ money that its two companies SIRECL and SHICL had raised from investors in 2007 and 2008.
The Sahara India Real Estate Corporation Ltd (SIRECL) and the Sahara Housing Investment Corporation Ltd (SHICL) had raised Rs 24,000 crore through optionally fully convertible debentures in 2007 and 2008.
The top court by its August 31, 2012 order directed Sahara to refund this amount with 15 per cent interest.
The Sahara group has already given a part of the money to SEBI that is parked in the SEBI-Sahara Refund Account.
On August 10, 2017, the apex court declined the plea of Sahara chief Subrata Roy to put on hold the auction of Aamby Valley and allowed the liquidator to go ahead with the auction.