Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Justice - Rich style

Subrata Roy was detained in prison earlier this year amid allegations of raising £2.3bn in illegal bonds. Roy, whose Sahara Group conglomerate is said to be worth an estimated £6.6bn, is involved in a dispute with India’s capital market’s watchdog amid claims that two of his firms raised £2.3bn by selling bonds that were found to be illegal. The companies have claimed they paid the money back to investors but the market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, has said they did not. Mr Roy, who sponsors a Formula One team and the Indian national hockey team, was ordered to be held in jail after he failed to answer a court summons in March.

From tomorrow he will have access to an air-conditioned meeting room, video conference facilities and the services of up to three secretarial staff. He will also be able to make use of a private lavatory. The unusual arrangements was given by India’s highest court after Mr Roy said he needed to sell off some of his property assets, including London’s Grosvenor House Hotel and New York’s Plaza Hotel, in order to secure £950m for bail.

Third-world justice for the wealthy? Bernie Ecclestone is expected to be cleared of bribery charges in Germany after paying an out-of-court settlement of £60m ($100m). It is a settlement without any conviction, the presumption of innocence is still valid. The bribery charges stem from a £27m payment made by Ecclestone and his Bambino family trust to Gerhard Gribkowsky, a former senior executive at German bank BayernLB. German prosecutors believed that the payment was a bribe to steer the sale of BayernLB’s controlling stake in Formula One to the investment fund CVC, which now owns the sport, in 2006. If Ecclestone had been found guilty the penalty could have been up to 10 years in prison.

 From here and here 

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