Kolkata, Sep 29 The Calcutta High Court on Tuesday granted a final five months to the Asset Disposal Committee (ADC), taking serious note of its "sluggish" performance over the past 10 years, to complete sale of the attached properties of the Rose Valley ponzi firm and disburse proceeds to eligible claimants/depositors.
The court also directed that the entire depositor fund amounting to Rs 550 crore held in the depositors' account must be fully disbursed against 32,43,220 claims pending before the ADC by November 15.
An ADC is an appointed group responsible for evaluating, valuing, and lawfully selling or clearing an organisation's or fraud scheme's surplus, obsolete, or seized assets.
A division bench presided by Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj granted the ADC a final extended period of five months to complete the process of selling attached properties, both movable and immovable, of Rose Valley and disbursing proceeds to eligible the claimants/ depositors.
"In evaluating the overall conduct of the Committee over the last eleven years from 2015 to 2026, this court expresses grave dissatisfaction with the Committee's sluggish pace of functioning, systematic mismanagement of depositors' accounts and total failure to safeguard corporate assets," the bench observed.
"As a direct result of this prolonged administrative inertia and inability to sell corporate assets, the value of movable properties under administration has depreciated to almost nil, while the majority of immovable properties have fallen into a severely dilapidated condition," the division bench said.
Rose Valley chit fund company owner Gautam Kundu, who is alleged to have siphoned investors' money to the tune of several thousand crores of rupees through various ponzi schemes, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in 2015 on financial fraud charges.
The bench directed that during this extended period, the three-member ADC will submit a monthly compliance report to the court, with the first one on November 17, enabling continuous judicial monitoring until its assigned responsibilities are concluded.
The division bench, also comprising Justice Sudip Deb, ordered that the ADC, which was formed in 2015, will be merged with the Justice S P Talukdar (retd) Committee, which is already managing the claims of victimised depositors across 103 chit fund companies, after the five-month window.
Taking "serious judicial note of the performance of the ADC over the past decade from 2015 to 2026," the court observed that the ADC remained substantially nonfunctional for nearly 10 years due to severe deficiencies in infrastructure, funding, office premises and administrative staff.
The division bench observed that while the principal mandate entrusted to the ADC was to identify, evaluate and attract prospective investors for timely disposal and monetisation of attached Rose Valley properties, "Its actual operational performance has fallen substantially short of that core objective."
It noted that during this decade-long tenure, the ADC issued public advertisements on merely two occasions for inviting investors/depositors.
"The ADC failed to discharge its fundamental responsibility of ensuring wider public participation in the property disposal and sale process," the court observed.
The bench said that despite administering attached assets valued at approximately Rs 600 crore under its supervision, the ADC succeeded in disbursing only around Rs 55.45 crore to victimised depositors, leaving over 90 per cent of the corpus undistributed alongside massive claim scrutiny backlogs.
The court said that instead of fulfilling its liquidating mandate, the ADC permitted the generation of funds from proceeds of crime by allowing illegal management contracts to be executed with third parties through Chocolate Hotels Private Limited (CHPL), a Rose Valley subsidiary.
