National Herald affair: It’s fraud all the way
By
S Gurumurthy
08th November 2012 07:42 AM
The bare facts exposed by Dr Subramanian Swamy on the National Herald
affair this month are eloquent, needing very little prose. The fraud is
explicit without exposition. Here are the basic facts. Financial crisis
forced Associated Journals Limited (AJL), the publishers of National
Herald newspaper founded by Pandit Nehru, to close down the paper in
2008. To pay off the employees to help the closure, the Congress Party
had given interest-free loan of Rs 90 crore plus to AJL, then. With the
newspaper shut, AJL had become a mere real estate company in 2008, with
property in Delhi, Lucknow and Mumbai worth over Rs 2,000 crore in its
balance sheet. Against this, AJL owed just Rs 90-crore plus to the
Congress. It had very little liability, besides. The balance real estate
of AJL, left after paying off the dues to Congress, legally and morally
belonged to AJL’s thousand plus shareholders. Big and small, they had
contributed Rs 89 lakh to AJL’s capital, when the Rupee was hundred
times more valuable. If AJL’s real estate had been sold and cash
distributed to the shareholders, Brahm Dev Narain, a teacher holding
just 41 equity shares in AJL, would have got some Rs 84,000. Hundreds
of others would have got similar sums.
