Showing posts with label real estate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label real estate. Show all posts
Friday, 2 August 2024
Thursday, 31 March 2016
The Tata's failure - Another nail for Indian corporate power?
Jayati Ghose in The Guardian
Thousands of steelworkers’ jobs are threatened as Indian company Tata threatens to walk away from its loss-making business in the UK. The move is causing shockwaves over the health of Britain’s manufacturing industry; but it is also a strong indicator of changing political and economic winds in India.
When Tata Steel acquired the steel giant Corus in 2007, it generated some cheers in India, but also raised eyebrows. The cheers were loudest among those who saw this as a macho declaration of Indian corporate arrival on the global scene. The purchase by Tata Steel of a company that was four times larger than itself made it at a stroke the fifth largest steel producer in the world and the first Fortune 500 multinational company from India.
But there were concerns over both the timing and the price at which the purchase was made. To fend off a Brazilian rival, Tata had to pay a 70% premium over the stock price. This was hefty for a company already in financial trouble with a large debt burden. And Tata paid only $4bn (£2.8bn) of the estimated $14bn final price out of its own funds – the rest was borrowed, mainly from Indian public sector banks.
Why were taxpayer-funded banks so willing to lend to a big conglomerate to buy up an overpriced European company, even as they denied loans to Indian farmers and small-scale producers? The sense of reversal of colonial roles might well have played a role. The deal was lauded by politicians as a sign that Indian industry had come of age as a global player, and so prudent considerations were simply cast aside.
Repayment of those loans was supposed to be made out of the profits of Tata Steel Europe. But those profits never came. At the time of acquisition Corus made an annual profit of about $800m, but since then the company has shown only losses – despite numerous rounds of restructuring, job cuts, asset sales and “modernisation”. In the past six months the company has shed around 3,500 jobs in the UK, but the financial indicators look worse than ever. This could result from incompetent management, but it also reflects worsening global conditions.
In Europe steel demand has been falling continuously over recent years, and there is fierce competition as Chinese exporters lower prices to cope with their own massive over-capacity. No one in the world really expects much dynamism from the European economy in the coming years.
By contrast, Indian steel demand is still increasing, if slowly, and the Indian operations still make profits. Tata Steel is now hugely weighed down by the UK business, which also accounts for around a third of its total debt. The charm of owning a big British company may no longer be enough to compensate. Instead, the urge is to cut losses and move out of an area that does not look likely to generate profits anytime soon.
Maybe the company also hopes the mere threat of exit will make the British government react by providing more subsidies – a technique that has worked in the past in India and elsewhere.
‘The Indian businessman Vijay Mallya fled to the UK and is now ensconced in his mansion in a London suburb.’ Photograph: Saurabh Das/AP
But this episode could also reflect collateral damage from another corporate scandal currently enthralling India. The flashy liquor baron Vijay Mallya, whose company Kingfisher Airlines (named after the beer his other company produces) collapsed, was also a major beneficiary of largesse from Indian banks. He now has unpaid debts of about £730m that he’s failed to pay for several years. Since he is also an elected member of the upper house of parliament, voted in by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party, this has caused a political outcry.
When the supreme court of India indicted him for abuse of law and ordered him to pay up or face the consequences, Mallya fled to the UK and is now ensconced in his mansion in a London suburb. He has offered to pay just over half of what he owes in six months’ time, an offer yet to be accepted. But his story must have raised concerns within Tata and among other large Indian businesses with huge debt – that even if the government spares them, the Indian courts may not.
So for now, Indian corporate chiefs planning to invest in the UK are more likely to be looking at real estate, rather than at multinational businesses.
Thousands of steelworkers’ jobs are threatened as Indian company Tata threatens to walk away from its loss-making business in the UK. The move is causing shockwaves over the health of Britain’s manufacturing industry; but it is also a strong indicator of changing political and economic winds in India.
When Tata Steel acquired the steel giant Corus in 2007, it generated some cheers in India, but also raised eyebrows. The cheers were loudest among those who saw this as a macho declaration of Indian corporate arrival on the global scene. The purchase by Tata Steel of a company that was four times larger than itself made it at a stroke the fifth largest steel producer in the world and the first Fortune 500 multinational company from India.
But there were concerns over both the timing and the price at which the purchase was made. To fend off a Brazilian rival, Tata had to pay a 70% premium over the stock price. This was hefty for a company already in financial trouble with a large debt burden. And Tata paid only $4bn (£2.8bn) of the estimated $14bn final price out of its own funds – the rest was borrowed, mainly from Indian public sector banks.
Why were taxpayer-funded banks so willing to lend to a big conglomerate to buy up an overpriced European company, even as they denied loans to Indian farmers and small-scale producers? The sense of reversal of colonial roles might well have played a role. The deal was lauded by politicians as a sign that Indian industry had come of age as a global player, and so prudent considerations were simply cast aside.
Repayment of those loans was supposed to be made out of the profits of Tata Steel Europe. But those profits never came. At the time of acquisition Corus made an annual profit of about $800m, but since then the company has shown only losses – despite numerous rounds of restructuring, job cuts, asset sales and “modernisation”. In the past six months the company has shed around 3,500 jobs in the UK, but the financial indicators look worse than ever. This could result from incompetent management, but it also reflects worsening global conditions.
In Europe steel demand has been falling continuously over recent years, and there is fierce competition as Chinese exporters lower prices to cope with their own massive over-capacity. No one in the world really expects much dynamism from the European economy in the coming years.
By contrast, Indian steel demand is still increasing, if slowly, and the Indian operations still make profits. Tata Steel is now hugely weighed down by the UK business, which also accounts for around a third of its total debt. The charm of owning a big British company may no longer be enough to compensate. Instead, the urge is to cut losses and move out of an area that does not look likely to generate profits anytime soon.
Maybe the company also hopes the mere threat of exit will make the British government react by providing more subsidies – a technique that has worked in the past in India and elsewhere.
‘The Indian businessman Vijay Mallya fled to the UK and is now ensconced in his mansion in a London suburb.’ Photograph: Saurabh Das/AP
But this episode could also reflect collateral damage from another corporate scandal currently enthralling India. The flashy liquor baron Vijay Mallya, whose company Kingfisher Airlines (named after the beer his other company produces) collapsed, was also a major beneficiary of largesse from Indian banks. He now has unpaid debts of about £730m that he’s failed to pay for several years. Since he is also an elected member of the upper house of parliament, voted in by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party, this has caused a political outcry.
When the supreme court of India indicted him for abuse of law and ordered him to pay up or face the consequences, Mallya fled to the UK and is now ensconced in his mansion in a London suburb. He has offered to pay just over half of what he owes in six months’ time, an offer yet to be accepted. But his story must have raised concerns within Tata and among other large Indian businesses with huge debt – that even if the government spares them, the Indian courts may not.
So for now, Indian corporate chiefs planning to invest in the UK are more likely to be looking at real estate, rather than at multinational businesses.
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
The 'right school'? No, parents staying together is the best way to help children
Children with a stable home life do better at school. Focus less on catchment areas and more on relationship counselling
'The more stable a home life children have, the better they will be able to concentrate at school, and the better grades they will have.' Photograph: Eye Ubiquitous / Alamy/Alamy
Parents do anything they can to give their kids the best chance to succeed. According to a report published by the Sutton Trust, a third of "professional parents" with children aged between five and 16 have moved to an area because they think it has good schools, and 18% to a specific school's catchment area.
Some go further: 6% of the 1,000 parents surveyed admitted attending church services when they hadn't previously to help their children get a place at a church school; 3% admitted using a relative's address to get children into a particular school; and 2% said they had bought a second home and used that address to qualify for a place.
As well as a fair few white lies, it all adds up to a colossal amount of money spent on trying to improve your children's chances of doing better educationally – and the point the Sutton Trust wants to make is that the more money you have, the more you can do to "buy" an advantage. Its recommendation – that the government should step in and encourage ballots for school places, to make selection fairer – seems a good one. After all, the drive to make things as rosy as possible for your offspring is inherent in all us parents: it's what we're designed to do, to achieve the best possible life chances for our children. That doesn't, or shouldn't, amount to fraud – it's a braver person than me who would cast the first stone and condemn parents for trying to give their kids the best start.
So it seems strange that parents, while focusing so intently on school, seem often to ignore a much cheaper way of improving their children's educational lot. Because the more stable a home life children have, the better they will be able to concentrate at school, the better behaved they will be in school, and the better grades they will have on leaving school.
There's plenty of research to back all this up: a recent study by the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre found that children aged seven and older tended to do more poorly in exams and to behave badly at school if their parents split up. Another report funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, released at the end of last year, found that a stable family life meant children were more likely to take in what's being offered in the classroom. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, teenagers whose parents are fighting or separating may find it difficult to concentrate at school.
Of course, many marriages are completely on track, 100% hunky dory, and here the only thing worth stressing about is a school's Sats and GCSE results. But it may not be you, and I have to admit it's not me either: I've been married for more than a quarter of a century, and the one thing I'm sure of is that it's not a bed of roses. I've also got four children aged between 11 and 21; and while I'm truly grateful to the many teachers who have taught them, and the schools they've been pupils at, I've become more convinced as the years go by that a stable home is an absolutely vital ingredient in how they're getting on – and certainly much more crucial than where their school sits in the local league table.
So shelling out a few hundred quid for a course of Relate counselling sessions (and if you're on a low income, it can be a lot less, or even free) could be a much better use of the family's funds than spending thousands on moving house. Sure, your children might end up at a school whose exam results aren't quite so glowing – but that's more than offset by the fact that they are likely to do better for having happier parents (and moving house, after all, puts even more pressure on a relationship).
According to Relate, 80% of clients who went for adult relationship counselling said their partnership had been strengthened as a result. According to a whole pile of research stretching back across many decades, children tend to do best when they're raised in a stable family. I can't help wondering whether the only sure winners from the scramble to live by the best school gates are estate agents rather than the very children the move is designed to help.
Wednesday, 7 November 2012
The vultures are circling after Hurricane Sandy!
Hurricane Sandy: Beware of America's disaster capitalists
The aftermath of the storm offers a chance to rebuild a fairer society. How can we seize it?
Destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in Breezy Point, New York. Photograph: Julie Hau/Demotix/Corbis
Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the east coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers' resistance to Big Box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city's refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: "Mom-and-pop stores simply can't do what big stores can in these circumstances," he wrote. He also warned that if the pace of reconstruction turned out to be sluggish (as it so often is) then "pro-union rules such as the Davis-Bacon Act" would be to blame, a reference to the statute that requires workers on public works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the prevailing wage in the region.
The same day, Frank Rapoport, a lawyer representing several billion-dollar construction and real estate contractors, jumped in to suggest that many of those public works projects shouldn't be public at all. Instead, cash-strapped governments should turn to public private partnerships, known as "P3s" in the US. That means roads, bridges and tunnels being rebuilt by private companies, which, for instance, could install tolls and keep the profits. These deals aren't legal in New York or New Jersey, but Rapoport believes that can change. "There were some bridges that were washed out in New Jersey that need structural replacement, and it's going to be very expensive," he told the Nation. "And so the government may well not have the money to build it the right way. And that's when you turn to a P3."
The prize for shameless disaster capitalism, however, surely goes to rightwing economist Russell S Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) should create "free-trade zones – in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended". This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, "better provide the goods and services victims need".
Yes, that's right: this catastrophe, very likely created by climate change – a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer – is just one more opportunity for further deregulation. And the fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labour protections they have left, as well as to privatise the meagre public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations.
The flurry of attempts to use Sandy's destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called the The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos.
One example: between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed or issued relating to "climate-ready" crops – seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme conditions such as droughts and floods; of these patents close to 80% were controlled by just six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta. With history as our teacher, we know that small farmers will go into debt trying to buy these new miracle seeds, and that many will lose their land.
In November 2010, the Economist ran a climate change cover story that provides a useful (if harrowing) blueprint for how climate change could serve as the pretext for the last great land grab, a final colonial clearing of the forests, farms and coastlines by a handful of multinationals. The editors explain that droughts and heat stress are such a threat to farmers that only big players can survive the turmoil, and that "abandoning the farm may be the way many farmers choose to adapt". They had the same message for fisherfolk occupying valuable ocean-front lands: wouldn't it be so much safer, given rising seas and all, if they joined their fellow farmers in the urban slums? "Protecting a single port city from floods is easier than protecting a similar population spread out along a coastline of fishing villages."
But, you might wonder, isn't there a joblessness problem in most of these cities? Nothing a little "reform of labour markets" and free trade can't fix. Besides, cities, they explain, have "social strategies, formal or informal". I'm pretty sure that means people whose "social strategies" used to involve growing and catching their own food can now cling to life by selling broken pens at intersections, or perhaps by dealing drugs. What the informal social strategy should be when superstorm winds howl through those precarious slums remains unspoken.
For a long time, climate change was treated by environmentalists as a great equaliser, the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor. They failed to account for the myriad ways by which the super rich would protect themselves from the less savory effects of the economic model that made them so wealthy. In the past six years, we have seen in the US the emergence of private fire fighters, hired by insurance companies to offer a "concierge" service to their wealthier clients, as well as the short-lived "HelpJet" – a charter airline in Florida that offered five-star evacuation services from hurricane zones. Now, post-Sandy, upmarket real estate agents are predicting that back-up power generators will be the new status symbol with the penthouse and mansion set.
For some, it seems, climate change is imagined less as a clear and present danger than as a kind of spa vacation; nothing that the right combination of bespoke services and well-curated accessories can't overcome. That, at least, was the impression left by the Barneys New York's pre-Sandy sale – which offered deals on sencha green tea, backgammon sets and $500 throw blankets so its high-end customers could "settle in with style".
So we know how the shock doctors are readying to exploit the climate crisis, and we know from the past how that story ends. But here is the real question: could this crisis present a different kind of opportunity, one that disperses power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it the hands of the few; one that radically expands the commons, rather than auctions it off in pieces? In short, could Sandy be the beginning of A People's Shock?
I think it can. As I outlined last year, there are changes we can make that actually have a chance of getting our emissions down to the level science demands. These include re-localising our economies (so we are going to need those farmers where they are); vastly expanding and reimagining the public sphere to not just hold back the next storm but to prevent even worse disruptions in the future; regulating the hell out of corporations and reducing their poisonous political power; and reinventing economics so it no longer defines success as the endless expansion of consumption.
Just as the Great Depression and the second world war launched movements that claimed as their proud legacies social safety nets across the industrialised world, so climate change can be a historic occasion to usher in the next great wave of progressive change. Moreover, none of the anti-democratic trickery I described in The Shock Doctrine is necessary to advance this agenda. Far from seizing on the climate crisis to push through unpopular policies, our task is to seize upon it to demand a truly populist agenda.
The reconstruction from Sandy is a great place to start road testing these ideas. Unlike the disaster capitalists who use crisis to end-run democracy, a People's Recovery (as many from the Occupy movement are already demanding) would call for new democratic processes, including neighbourhood assemblies, to decide how hard-hit communities should be rebuilt. The overriding principle must be addressing the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time. For starters, that means reconstruction that doesn't just create jobs but jobs that pay a living wage. It means not just more public transit, but energy-efficient, affordable housing along those transit lines. It also means not just more renewable power, but democratic community control over those projects.
But at the same time as we ramp up alternatives, we need to step up the fight against the forces actively making the climate crisis worse. That means standing firm against the continued expansion of the fossil fuel sector into new and high-risk territories, whether through tar sands, fracking, coal exports to China or Arctic drilling. It also means recognising the limits of political pressure and going after the fossil fuel companies directly, as we are doing at 350.org with our "Do The Math" tour. These companies have shown that they are willing to burn five times as much carbon as the most conservative estimates say is compatible with a liveable planet. We've done the maths, and we simply can't let them.
Either this crisis will become an opportunity for an evolutionary leap, a holistic readjustment of our relationship with the natural world. Or it will become an opportunity for the biggest disaster capitalism free-for-all in human history, leaving the world even more brutally cleaved between winners and losers.
When I wrote The Shock Doctrine, I was documenting crimes of the past. The good news is that this is a crime in progress; it is still within our power to stop it. Let's make sure that, this time, the good guys win.
Monday, 8 October 2012
Robert Vadra - Rent Seeker or Entrepreneur?
In February, as rumours of the ambitions of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law swirled amidst the heat and dust of the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, her daughter Priyanka moved to scotch speculation about Robert Vadra’s possible political future.
“He’s a successful businessman,” the younger Ms. Gandhi said of her husband, “who is not interested in changing his occupation.”
Even though Mr. Vadra has increasingly emerged in the public eye, there has been little information on just how successful a businessman he is — and how his empire was built.
Last year, The Economic Times first wrote about his “low-key entry into the real estate business” with the help of DLF Ltd, India’s largest commercial property developer. And on Friday, Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan of India Against Corruption (IAC) released documents which showed how Mr. Vadra has acquired land assets in and around the National Capital Region worth hundreds of crores of rupees, sometimes at prices below market value — funded by interest-free loans disbursed to him by DLF and other companies for no apparent reason.
Though the documents reveal no illegality or impropriety on the part of Mr. Vadra, they do raise the question of why DLF — which is a publicly traded company — would enter into multiple business transactions with him on terms that appear highly preferential. The company on Saturday issued a lengthypress release setting out its side of the story but questions of corporate governance remain and minority shareholders are likely to ask the company for the rationale behind its arrangement with Ms. Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law and whether similar soft loans (or “advances” as DLF prefers to call them) and deals have been transacted with companies owned by other prominent individuals. The answer to the second question may help explain why a normally feisty Opposition has been remarkably silent on the DLF-Vadra connection since the story first broke in 2011.
In 1997, the year Mr. Vadra married Priyanka Gandhi, he incorporated his first, modest business — Artex, which dealt with brass handicrafts and fashion accessories. From 2007, there was a surge in his activities. Inside of a year, he founded five other ventures, spanning the real estate, hospitality and trading sectors.
Ms. Gandhi maintained a distance from these companies: in 2008, she dissociated herself from the sole business in which she was involved, aircraft charter firm Blue Breeze Trading.
From balance sheets and directors’ reports released by IAC and additional papers obtained by The Hindu, which relate to six group companies, it is clear that Mr. Vadra’s rise was meteoric. In 2007-2008, his companies started out with promoter funds of just Rs. 50 lakh.
However, the companies succeeded in acquiring 29 high-value properties by 2010, armed with loans and advances of Rs. 80 crore from DLF,… as well as Bedarwals Infra Projects, Nikhil International and VRS Infrastructure. These included a Rs. 31.7 crore acquisition of a 50 per cent share of Saket Courtyard by 2010, armed with loans and advances of Rs. 80 crore from DLF, as well as Bedarwals Infra Projects, Nikhil International and VRS Infrastructure.
These included a Rs. 31.7 crore acquisition of a 50 per cent share of Saket Courtyard Hospitality, which owns the 114-bed Hilton Garden Hotel in New Delhi; a 10,000 square foot penthouse, number B1115, at the DLF Aralias complex for Rs 89.41 lakh; 7 apartments in DLF Magnolia for Rs. 5.2 crore; apartments for Rs. 5.06 crore at DLF Capital Greens; and a DLF-owned plot in Delhi’s ultra-posh Greater Kailash II area for Rs. 1.21 crore. Though DLF’s press release said some of these prices were “completely incorrect,” the investment numbers are all stated in the balance sheets filed by Mr. Vadra’s companies with the Registrar of Companies.
Then, at the end of 2010, Mr. Vadra’s companies also picked up a bouquet of rural properties: 160.62 acres of agricultural land in Bikaner for Rs. 1.02 crore, and Rs. 2.43 crore for an additional 5 parcels of land of unknown acreage; land at Manesar, on Delhi’s fringes, for Rs. 15.38 crore; land at Palwal for Rs. 42 lakh, land at Hayyatpur, in Gurgaon, for roughly Rs. 4 crore; land at Hasanpur for Rs. 76.07 lakh; land at Mewat for Rs. 95.42 lakh; unidentified agricultural land for Rs. 69.09 lakh; and two ‘other real estate bookings’ worth Rs. 9 lakh.
From just Rs. 7.95 crore in fiscal 2008, Vadra’s fixed assets and investments grew to Rs 17.18 crore in fiscal 2009, jumping a staggering 350 per cent in a single year to Rs 60.53 crore in fiscal 2010, the year in which most of these properties were acquired with promoter funds of just Rs. 50 lakh along with interest of Rs. 255.46 lakh earned on advances and loans and zero group activity or profitability.
Despite the high market value of these listed assets (properties), though, the declared investment portfolio in Mr. Vadra’s balance sheets remained a meagre Rs. 71 crore at the end of fiscal 2010 with accumulated group losses of Rs. 3 crore.
Mr. Vadra’s companies did not respond to e-mails sent by The Hindu seeking clarifications on the details of these transactions. In particular, it remains unclear why DLF and other major corporations would have made him large loans, since this is not in the nature of their business. Nor did Mr. Vadra’s companies have any apparent prior specialisation in real estate business.
Financial wizardry
The financial information available from the balance sheets and directors’ reports of Mr. Vadra’s companies — Sky Light Hospitality, Sky Light Realty, Blue Breeze Trading, Artex, Real Earth Estates and North India IT Parks — raise hard questions about what business it is they actually do, and how this business is conducted.
Each of the companies has 268, Sukhdev Vihar, New Delhi, as its common address, and Mr. Vadra and his mother Maureen Vadra as directors. Mr. Vadra, the documents show, receives remuneration of Rs. 60 lakh per annum from just one company, Sky Light Realty. The payment, the company’s auditor states is “remuneration in excess of the limit prescribed under section 217 (2A) of the Companies Act, 1956 read with the Companies (Particulars of Employees) Rules 1975.”
There are no other employee costs in the books, either to his mother or to others. However, in the documents, both directors “place on record their deep sense of appreciation for the committed services of executives, staff and workers of the company.”
Strangely, while assets balloon in each subsequent balance sheet, there is no account of the corresponding enhancement of visible business activity. For example, the balance sheets raise a current liability of Rs. 50 crore against the Manesar land, though it was registered for just Rs.15.38 crore in the same financial year, defying all commercial and financial prudence and raising doubts about whether this was an income rather than a current liability.
A senior chartered accountant told The Hindu on condition of anonymity, given the individuals involved, that masking incomes as loans/current liabilities in this manner is an unorthodox accounting device. “Using short term funding of this kind to create long-term assets defies financial prudence as it constitutes a high business risk, unless they are not really ‘current liabilities’ and are not payable in the short term, which means they are nothing but incomes which have been disguised,” he said. Vadra’s auditors consistently overlook this in all six firms, while accounting firm Khurana & Khurana in its Auditors Report for Real Earth Estates Pvt. Ltd. for the year 2010, actually opts to gloss over this by stating: “Based on the information and explanation given to and on an overall examination of the balance sheet of the company, in our opinion, there are no funds raised on short term basis which have been used for long term investment.”
The auditor’s accounting rigor comes into further question with its statement that according to the information and explanations given to us, the company has, during the year, not granted any loans, secured or unsecured to companies, firm or other parties covered in the register maintained under section 31 of the Companies Act 1956, excepting the advances under business obligation accordingly paragraphs 4 (iii) (a) (b) (c) and (d) of the order are not applicable. However, the balance sheet shows loans and advances of Rs 2.89 crore for the company in 2010.
Many such loans, which reflect as total current liability of Rs. 72 crore in the accounts, are invested in long-term assets like land. Curiously, no one appears to be pressing for the return of these loans — which are, according to the documents, interest-free.
Additionally, all of Mr. Vadra’s companies show interest income from fixed deposits, claiming tax deducted at source for this interest without accounting for the fixed deposits themselves in the balance sheets. The six companies’ profitability, which grew from zero in 2007-8 to Rs. 20.94 lakh in 2008-9 to Rs. 255.46 lakh in 2009-10, was not from any business activity in these companies but purely from interest on 23 elusive fixed deposits amounting to roughly Rs. 5 crore.
There are other unexplained gaps in the financial information. As of March 31, 2010, the group profit and loss account shows that only Sky Light Realty made a profit, and that too in one single year. Yet, while the others show losses, they continue to make investments. This profit of Rs. 244.98 lakh was despite a complete absence of business activity or liquidation/reduction of fixed assets, investments or other bookings. However, the accumulated losses of Rs. 3 crore from the other 5 firms in the RV Group’s 2010 balance sheet wipe out Vadra’s capital and reserves, raising questions about his ability to buy so many high value properties with zero capital.
DLF’s fortunes
Perhaps the key to the relationship could lie in DLF’s troubled fortunes since 2008 — the very time its dealings with Mr. Vadra acquired significant scale. According to a March 1, 2012 report by the respected Veritas Investment Research Corporation, DLF Ltd is an organisation under duress, with its management scrambling to consummate assets sales, rationalize its land bank and divest non-core operations.
Since a May, 2007 Initial Public Offering, which sold at Rs. 525 per share, the stock price declined by 46 per cent in March 2012 compared to a roughly 30 per cent gain in the Sensex over the same period with the stock presently trading at Rs. 241.80, a steep 54.13 per cent dip.
Veritas points to questionable related-party transactions, aggressive and conflicting accounting policies, self-enrichment and inability to deliver on promises, and a balance sheet stretched to the limit, with no free cash flow and no credible plan to de-lever its balance sheet. “If your investment decision incorporates management integrity, then bypassing DLF will be an easy choice,” the Veritas report states.
In addition, Veritas does “not believe the disclosed book equity and asset base of the company,” stating that via its dealings (merger) with DLF Assets Ltd (DAL), from FY 2007 to FY 2011, the company inflated sales by at least Rs. 11,236 crore and its profit before tax by Rs. 7,233 crore.
A slowing real estate market in a high inflation environment and over-exposure to Gurgaon — among India’s most speculative real estate markets — is further expected to create tremendous pressure on the company’s balance sheet. “In the end, we believe DLF will seek assistance from financial institutions to restructure its loans,” the report affirms, urging investors not to buy DLF stock. DLF dismissed the report as “mischievous and presumptive.”
Mr. Vadra himself has attributed his brass-to-gold success story to hard work—and a little help from “family” friends like K.P. Singh, the chairman of the DLF Group. However, Mr. Vadra has strongly denied taking any favours from DLF in the past. “I have a good understanding with DLF. Our children are friends, we are friends. They are seasoned businessmen. They are not daft… They don't need me to enhance them. They’ve existed for years,” he told The Economic Times in March 2011.
Indeed, in January 2002, he made his distaste for favour-seeking capitalism public, dissociating himself from his brother and father, alleging that they were promising jobs and favours using his name and association with the Gandhi family. His father responded by suing him for defamation.
Hard work Mr. Vadra may well have put into building his property empire. But the help he received from friends like DLF suggests at least a part of his success flowed from the willingness of others to bet on the outcome of his enterprise.
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