Subrata Roy: Who made it large, drop by drop in good and bad times
What he started with a borrowed capital of just Rs 2,000 in 1978, kept growing for over three decades and became a corpus of tens of thousands of crores
Sahara Group chief Subrata Roy
NEW DELHI: His was a story that can sound like an urban legend, but Subrata Roy literally made it large, drop by drop.
What he started with a borrowed capital of just Rs 2,000 in 1978, kept growing for over three decades and became a corpus of tens of thousands of crores with contributions as low as Rs 10-20 each from investors, but then it started crumbling down, brick by brick.
Roy, who died in Mumbai on Tuesday after a prolonged illness at the age of 75, continued to make it large, even while battling it out in courts and before regulators.
When asked for proof of payments collected from his crores of investors and the repayments made to them with returns, he famously sent 128 trucks containing more than 31,000 cartons of documents to capital market regulator Sebi’s headquarters in Mumbai. Flummoxed by the humongous task of sorting and verifying tonnes of investor papers, the Securities and Exchange Board of India had to put them in a huge hired warehouse having ‘automated robotic system’ document handling and safe vaults with 32 lakh cubic feet of storage capacity. In another mammoth task later, Sebi had to engage a server hosting vendor to provide electronic data storage and web access services for a database of 20 crore scanned pages in the high-profile Sahara case. On the other hand, the Sebi saga began with just two sets of complaints -- one from a small group of ‘investors’ and another from an individual named ‘Roshan Lal’ -- but it eventually turned out to be the biggest nemesis for Roy’s sprawling business empire.
Before it all started falling apart, the Sahara portfolio comprised financial services, realty, aviation, marquee hotels in London and New York, an IPL cricket team and a Formula 1 racing team besides sponsorships for the country’s cricket and hockey teams. And then, there was one of the most ambitious projects - a hillside township in Maharashtra, Aamby Valley, supposed to have villas for virtually all who’s who of the country from cricket to films to politics where he had many ‘friends’.
