'Essel Group repaid ₹43,000 crore debt': Subhash Chandra seeks independent audit to examine his debt

Facing questions over his debt, personal guarantees and insolvency proceedings, Essel Group founder Subhash Chandra on Friday said the group had repaid about ₹43,000 crore of its total ₹45,000 crore borrowings, and called for an independent audit of the group’s debt, defaults and repayments. He urged the banking system and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to appoint an independent auditor to examine the position.

Chandra said he was responding to what he described as allegations and speculation around him, his family and the group’s financial position. He also rejected claims that the matter before the National Company Law Tribunal involved ₹22,000 crore, saying the actual amount linked to objecting lenders was around ₹3,900 crore and arose from personal guarantees given to certain lenders.

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What Chandra said

Subhash Chandra said the group’s problems began surfacing on 24 January 2019 because of an asset-liability mismatch. He said he then wrote an open letter to the banking system, acknowledging his mistakes and committing to repay the debt of the group and its borrowing entities.

“I am the first person to accept that I made a mistake in the corporate world,” Chandra said. He added that the group sold family and personal assets to meet obligations, that Zee was almost sold, and that his house was also mortgaged to raise funds. “We didn’t keep anything,” he said.

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According to Chandra, of the group’s total ₹45,000 crore loan amount, ₹43,000 crore has been repaid, while about ₹2,000 crore remains stalled because of asset-liability issues. He said the group remained stuck in some areas, especially infrastructure, where payments were due from state governments, and added that one or two properties would also need to be sold.

NCLT proceedings and claims

Chandra said the NCLT proceedings relate to personal guarantees he had provided and not to personal borrowing. He said some lenders had already been repaid but had nevertheless filed claims before the tribunal. He said about ₹620 crore in claims linked to borrowing entities had already been repaid, while a settlement offer of roughly ₹1,100 crore remained pending before certain lenders. “As a group, we are committed to paying back the lenders,” he said.

In the broader insolvency matter, admitted claims totalled ₹22,006.57 crore, and the NCLT this week approved a repayment plan of about ₹6.5 crore. HDFC Bank said it plans to appeal against the approval before the appellate tribunal and said its admitted claim was 3.2 per cent of the total stated claim amount.

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Net worth and media remarks

Chandra said some people had taken the group’s market capitalisation and presented it as his personal net worth, pointing to an alleged figure of ₹35,000 crore reported in 2017 as an example. He said that when he became a Rajya Sabha member in 2016, his declared net worth was around ₹339 crore.

In a statement on Thursday, Chandra had said that “certain vested media houses are spreading wrong information about my personal insolvency matter in NCLT”. On Friday, the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Group rejected allegations against its media entities as “baseless”, with a spokesperson saying, “We strongly deny the allegations and insinuations against the media entities that are a part of the Reliance Group”.

The spokesperson added, “Our media brands have never been used to attack anyone, nor will they ever be.” Chandra reiterated his demand for an independent audit to establish how much the group had borrowed when it first defaulted and how much it had subsequently repaid.