Supreme Court’s money push for Amrapali home projects and a completion plan

Coming down heavily on the Amrapali group, the Supreme Court has today ordered forensic audit report to be given to Enforcement Directorate, police, Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) for action against the directors and auditors of the construction group for siphoning off over ₹3,000 crore of home buyers’ money.

The top court has also ordered disbursal of ₹7.16 crore to National Buildings Construction Corporation Limited (NBCC) for completion of stalled projects of the builder.

Also, Noida, Greater Noida authorities will set up nodal cell for giving completion certificates to home buyers, the top court said.

Last week, the Noida and Greater Noida authorities had said they will file a review plea before the Supreme Court to recover around ₹5,700 crore in land dues from Amrapali Group.

The Supreme Court, in its July 23 order, had directed the Noida and Greater Noida authorities to execute registries of ready flats and transfer them to buyers within a month, without bothering about the dues that Amrapali still owes them.

The Greater Noida authority has to recover ₹3,700 crore from Amrapali, whose directors are in Tihar jail for failing to deliver flats and on charges of diversion of funds, while the Noida authority has to recover around ₹2,000 crore from the developer.

On July 23, the top court had ordered cancellation of the registration of Amrapali Group under the real estate law, RERA, and ousted it from its prime properties in the NCR by nixing the land leases. The court had directed a fresh probe by the Enforcement Directorate into alleged money laundering by realtors besides the investigation being done by Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police.

It had directed the state-run NBCC to complete the stalled projects of the Amrapali Group, whose directors Anil Kumar Sharma, Shiv Priya and Ajay Kumar are behind the bars on the top court’s order.

On July 23, the top court had also directed the Centre and state governments to ensure that appropriate action is taken against builders who have not completed their projects in Noida and Greater Noida as well as in other states.

It directed the Centre and states to ensure that projects are completed in a time-bound manner as contemplated in RERA and home buyers are not defrauded, and ordered the Noida and Greater Noida authorities to give completion certificate to the home buyers of Amrapali group who are already residing in various projects.

The top court had also termed the sequence of events in Amrapali group a “shocking and surprising state of affairs” where such large-scale cheating has taken place and middle and poor class home buyers were duped and deprived of their hard-earned money.

It said the high-profile realtor diverted the homebuyers’ money in other projects, played fraud on them by not adhering to the time frame to complete projects and also failed to comply with the orders of the apex court.