Monday, November 3, 2014

Sebi tells PACL to refund over Rs 44,000 crore in three months

The Securities and Exchange Board of India has ordered PACL, formerly called Pearl Agrotech Corporation, and its promoters to refund over Rs 44,376 crore that it collected until March 2012 through collective investment schemes (CIS).

This is the biggest crackdown by Sebi on an entity in monetary terms. PACL has three months to comply with the order. The regulator has said that it would take steps to register a civil/criminal case in case of non-compliance.

“PACL Limited, its promoters and directors, shall wind up all the existing Collective Investment Schemes of PACL Limited and refund the monies collected by the said company under its schemes with returns which are due to its investors… within a period of three months,” said the Sebi order passed by its whole-time member Prashant Saran.

Armed with the new powers conferred upon it under the new Sebi Bill, the order further said, “Sebi shall also initiate attachment and recovery proceedings under the Sebi Act.”

In a statement on Friday, PACL said that it will approach the Securities Appellate Tribunal against the directive of the capital markets regulator. “Sebi has unfortunately failed to recognise the submissions of the company that it can’t be treated like a CIS. The company would now appeal this order before the Securities Appellate Tribunal,” PACL said.

“PACL limited, in its submission to the Sebi bench had submitted that it is not running a CIS,” the statement added.

Sebi has been pursuing the case for almost 17 years and its probe spanned various locations including Delhi, Mumbai and Rajasthan.

The case against PACL and its promoters and directors including Tarlochan Singh, Sukhdev Singh, Gurmeet Singh and Subrata Bhattacharya, dates back to 1997, when Sebi first alleged that the company was running a CIS without its permission.

It found that the company was running a land purchase scheme where it was collecting money from investors to buy land. PACL moved the Rajasthan High Court, which in an order on November 28, 2003, held that the schemes of were not CIS and quashed two letters Sebi sent in 1999.

Sebi appealed to the Supreme Court against the order. The apex court on February 26, 2013, set aside the high court order, paving the way for Sebi to pursue the case, which has resulted in Friday’s order.

PACL had claimed to Sebi that it got its revenue from the sale of land, flats, commercial space etc and had other business activities such as sale of farm produce.

The Sebi probe, however, established that until March 2012, the company had received a total customer advance of Rs 44,736 crore under two land-linked plans and had also paid commissions of Rs 7,893 crore to its agents.

Sebi also found out that while PACL had 4.63 crore customers until March 2014 and the amount outstanding against them stood at Rs 29,420 crore, the value of total lands with the company at that point was only Rs 11,707 crore.

Marriet Pinto is a resident of Mangalore in coastal Karnataka. She joined one of the schemes of PACL, formerly Pearl Agrotech Corporation, in 2005. In December 2007, she bought 1,001 square yards of land in an undisclosed location in Rajasthan for Rs 15,000 from Chailbihari, a resident of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. Both Pinto and Chailbihari were not present in Delhi where the sale deed was executed. Suresh Sinha, a Noida-based senior assistant of PACL, held Pinto's power of attorney, while one Manoj Kumar signed the deal on behalf of Chailbihari. Kumar also helped Rajina Begam of Perambalur, Tamil Nadu, buy 0.084 hectare of land in Madhya Pradesh for Rs 15,000.

Pinto and Begam are among the 19,284 customers who got a piece of land registered under their name. Apart from these, PACL has over 12 million customers to whom land was allotted but no sale deed was executed. According to its statement to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on August 11, it had another 46.3 million customers to whom land was yet to be allotted. Eleven days later, whole-time Member Prashant Saran asked PACL to wind up operations and repay investors in full within a period of three months. The amount to be repaid is Rs 49,100 crore - more than double the Rs 24,000-crore that the Sahara group has to give back to its investors.

The company did not respond to the questionnaires emailed to it by Business Standard. However, after news had broken out about the investigation, the group CEO, Jyoti Narayan, had told the media in July that the firm was a real estate developer and had never indulged in any collective investment scheme to double or triple the money deposited by investors. And, soon after the group was asked to refund the money to investors, PACL officials, speaking to television channels, said the company planned to move the against the Sebi order. They added that the interests of investors would not be jeopardised.

PACL offered customers two major plans to purchase a piece of land: a cash-down payment plan and an installment payment plan. PACL says it gets the customers to invest in land in undeveloped areas. The company then 'develops' this land. As the value of the developed land goes up, PACL helps the customer to own it. What if the customer does not want possession but wants to exit with gains? For them, PACL offers the 'opt-out' option. This option, which is exercised by a majority of PACL customers, has long convinced regulators that this is nothing but a money circulation scheme.

On perusal of the case of Agrahari Kusumlata (out of a sample of 500 customers), Sebi noted that the customer was not made aware of the location of the plot till the stage of issuing of the allotment letter. In Kusumlata's case, it was allotted after four years. That is not all. It was also seen that even after the allotment of land, PACL reserved the right to change the location of the land. The "letter of allotment of plot" also stated that the original title deeds would be retained by the custodial services company of PACL and that the customer would only get a certified copy of the sale deed.

Another important clause in the letter said that PACL reserved the right to change the location of the land and allot another land at a location different from what was given in the first instance. "This kind of right is never seen in a pure real estate transaction. The change of location unilaterally by PACL without referring such proposal to the customer could be seen as a means to force a customer to 'opt out' and move away with the returns promised by it, rather than allowing a customer to hold on to the site for which he makes the payment," Saran observed in his order.

One complicated aspect of the case is the land holdings it claims to have. It has purchased over 303,000 acres of land between 2005-06 and 2011-12. However, only 17 per cent, or about 53,890 acres, was bought in its own name. An overwhelming 70 per cent, or 214,000 acres, is held through general power of attorney, and the remaining through associate companies and subsidiaries. PACL in its reply to Sebi has disclosed these associate companies are controlled by its friends and those of its management.

In many cases, the associate companies are floated by PACL agents who have grown big enough to handle the business on their own. According to people familiar with the operations, PACL's 3.3 million agents are arranged in a hierarchy of 12 ranks based on their customer base. A Rank-12 agent, the highest level, can have anywhere between 60,000 and 70,000 agents under him. These big agents are allowed to own the land, corresponding to the money they collect. PACL pays its agents handsomely, Sebi found: out of the money collected, nearly 20 per cent goes to paying agents. Agents have received over Rs 8,500 crore in commissions from PACL over the years, according to the market regulator. This loose-federation model of operation has led to much litigation as some rogue agents have sold off the land and pocketed the money. Disputes running into several thousand crores have been recorded in the balance sheet of PACL.

Is the land bank of PACL enough to pay off the customers? Though PACL has developed commercial and residential properties in cities like Delhi, Chandigarh and Ludhiana, a large portion of its land bank seems to be in undeveloped stretches such as the desert lands along the India-Pakistan border in Rajasthan. In a proposal submitted to Sebi on a five-year refund plan, the company said it had land worth Rs 11,706.96 crore (agricultural land of Rs 7,322.11 crore and commercial land of Rs 4,384.84 crore). Of this, it has not only to meet the claims of the 46.3 million customers who have deposited Rs 29,420 crore with it but also to satisfy the 12.2 million customers to whom land has been allotted but sale deeds have not been executed. "PACL has not given the complete details of the land it claims to hold. In view of this, the proposal does not appear to be serious and reasonable," the Sebi order noted.

For people like Pinto who actually got land allotted, albeit in places they have never been to, Sebi found various gaps in the claims. The regulator pointed out that the date of purchase of land by sellers and the date of sale deed were too close for PACL to have undertaken any serious development. "For example, in the case of Pinto, the land was purchased on June 18, 2007, and was transferred in the name of the customer on December 08, 2007 - just after six months. This shows that PACL pools the money for the purchase of land and does not do any development of the land," Saran said in his August 22 order.


Property developer PACL said it would appeal a regulator's order to return at least $8.1 billion to investors in a land-for-funds scheme, as depositors went to the company's New Delhi office to demand their money back.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Friday ordered unlisted PACL to refund the money within three months, after ruling that the company's investment schemes had not been registered with the capital markets regulator.
PACL on Monday assured investors that their deposits were safe while saying its scheme - which promised depositors returns on investments in agricultural land - did not have to be registered.
"We assure our customers that their investments are safe and their interests would not be jeopardized," PACL said in a statement
PACL is also being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for what the country's top crime-fighting agency has described as "an alleged scam" for raising money from millions of investors under the guise of the sale and development of agricultural land.
SEBI in its order on Friday said PACL's land holdings did not cover the amount of money raised from investors. The company denied that on Monday, saying it had "sufficient asset holdings".
Companies such as PACL operate in a regulatory grey area that has developed because almost half of India's more than a billion people do not have access to formal banking. But regulators fear this makes investors vulnerable to unregulated investment schemes.
Last year, Kolkata-based Saradha Group was ordered to return $3.7 billion after running a deposit scheme that went bust.
About a dozen investors and agents gathered at PACL's main office in Delhi as three security officers guarded the entrance.
Vijender Kumar, a 24-year-old in the nursing sector, said he had come from the outskirts of Delhi after reading about PACL in a newspaper since his father had invested 60,000 rupees over five years until 2013.
Kumar said he was forced to take a loan to treat his ailing mother after PACL did not return his deposit last year on maturity even after visiting his local PACL branch 10 times. He said PACL had given a slew of reasons, including blaming regulators for freezing the deposits.
"We feel duped," Kumar said. "This money means a lot for us."
No PACL official was available to answer Reuters queries in the Delhi office.
($1 = 60.5650 Indian rupees)

Within days of the market regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) crackdown on Rajasthan-based PACL India Limited (Pearls), a large group of depositors protested at the Puducherry office of PACL located in Mudaliarpet, and demanded that their investments be returned.

Like scores of their counterparts across the country, depositors in and around Puducherry had invested varying amounts from Rs 20,000 to Rs 5 lakh under various schemes in the real estate development company. Depositors had come from Tindivanam, Panruti, Marakkanam, Cuddalore, Chidambaram, Karaikal, Madukkarai, Ulundurpet and Puducherry. The depositors who had gathered said the branch owed them around Rs 17 crore.
The management staffs have been uncooperative, the depositors claimed.
“My deposit matured a year ago and I have been coming to the office regularly only to be turned away each time,” said Nagarani, who had invested Rs60,000. New investors who had turned up for their deposits to be returned were also being turned away, said P. Manikandan, who had invested Rs 5 lakh in February this year. “I am not being allowed to withdraw the deposit,” he said. Police personnel from the Mudaliarpet police station tried pacifying the depositors, who had gheraoed the in-charge manager’s office. They left the premises on being promised that the issue would be taken up with higher authorities and they would get a reply by Monday next week. Depositors said the company had employed field agents who canvassed and promised double returns on their investment.
On August 22, SEBI passed an order asking PACL to abstain from collecting money from investors, launching schemes and asked it to return around Rs. 50,000 crore due to investors.

A day after market regulator SEBI directed property developer PACL to refund a minimum Rs. 29,420.65 crore collected from 58.5 million investors within three months and shut shop, company sources said they would likely file a writ petition instead of appealing the order at the Securities Appellate Tribunal.
PACL (or Pearl Agrotech Corporation Ltd ) is promoted by real estate developer Nirmal Singh Bhangoo, also known for sponsoring Kings Punjab XI in IPL4, the 2013 India-West Indies ODI and T20 series, mixed martial arts programme Super Fight League on ESPN and Golf Premier League promoted by businessman Raj Kundra and actor Sanjay Dutt.
When HT contacted company advocate Sameer Parekh, he denied knowledge of any such decision by PACL. “I will be meeting them only on Monday. I have no instruction or information since I have not discussed anything with them,” he said. 
Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who appeared for PACL before SEBI, refused comment.
So did the company’s law officer, Meeta Sharma.
In a statement Friday, PACL had said, “SEBI has failed to recognize the submissions of the company, that it can’t be treated like a CIS (collective investment scheme). The company would now appeal this order before the Securities Appellate Tribunal.”
But the sources said Saturday that PACL could take the writ petition route instead. “The advantage of bringing in new evidence and pointing to issues ignored by SEBI is possible in a writ petition. An appeal before SAT would only look into a very limited aspect of the order and may not have the scope to provide the relief PACL and its promoters are seeking,” one source said.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India’s finding show that between March 2012 and June 2014, PACL mobilized about `49,000 crore from its customers.
PACL was a finance company in 1983-1987. It put money from investors in farm land and assured returns based on agricultural performance. Currently, it has construction projects in north, west and south India and has expanded into tourism, hospitality, medical colleges and investments in hotels in Australia.
In November 2008, it entered the media with Pearl Broadcasting Corporation.
Sources in SEBI said the CBI and Delhi Police have been informed of the order and they may take appropriate action soon. However, the CBI said the case was between SEBI and the courts.




CBI today claimed the documents recovered by it during searches at the premises of Delhi-based business groups PACL and PGF show they allegedly used ponzi scheme to cheat nearly five crore investors of Rs 45,000 rpt Rs 45,000 crore. In its case against PACL and PGF, CBI has named PGF DirectorNirmal Singh Bhangoo andn PACL Director Sukhdev Singh besides six other directors of the companies. The groups had allegedly raised investments from over five crore gullible investors through collective investment scheme under the garb of sale and development of agricultural land, CBI spokesperson said here today. She said that after preliminary analysis of documents the agency came to know of the enormity of the scam. In Ponzi schemes, returns are given to investors from the money collected from other depositors in a pyramid-like structure. "Initial investigation by CBI has revealed an alleged scam to the tune of Rs 45,000 crores in a case relating to an alleged fraud by Delhi-based private company and others through raising investments...through collective investment scheme under the garb of sale and development of agricultural land," CBI said. PACL and PGF did not respond to emails sent seeking their comments. The sources said CBI at first did not realise the gravity of the scam and it was only when some laptops were opened they came to know that their earlier estimates about the size of the scam were just a tip of the iceberg. CBI sources said the agency had carried out an inquiry, on the orders of the Supreme Court, into allegations that the companies had collected crores of rupees through deposits from public at large through their ponzi scheme promising land. CBI sources said that during the searches it has recovered documents which show benami properties worth crore in India and abroad. The investments made by the company in a hotel in Gold Coast, Australia, have also come under the scanner of CBI. The spokesperson said CBI has found prima-facie evidence which shows that PGF, having an office in Pashchim Vihar in West Delhi, has raised investments by issuing bogus land allotment letters to induce the investors. "It was revealed that PGF, on being directed by the High Court of Punjab and Haryana to wind up the scheme and refund the money to the investors, a similar fraudulent scheme was operated under the name of PACL with office at Barakhamba Road," CBI alleged. It is alleged that funds collected from new investors of PACL were used to repay the earlier investors of PGF to stave off criminal prosecution. The agency has carried out searches at the offices of PGF and PACL at their offices in New Delhi, Chandigarh, Mohali, Ropar and Jaipur. CBI sources said the accused persons have been called to appear for questioning even as a preliminary round of interrogation has been done by the sleuths. "Funds have been raised by the two companies through a vast network of lakhs of commission agents spread all over the country who were being paid hefty commissions for luring the investors," the spokesperson said. The searches were conducted at the premises of Directors Harcharan Singh, Chandra Bhushan Dhillon, Prem Chand, Gurmeet Singh, Subrato Bhattacharya among others.

Read more at: http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/real-estate-cos-ponzi-scam-worth-over-rs-45000-crore-cbi_1048899.html?utm_source=ref_article

No comments:

Post a Comment