Binani Cement takeover: UtraTech gets CCI approval, Dalmia Bharat claims highest bid
Kolkata: Amid the ongoing battle for taking over insolvent Binani Cement, UltraTech Cement on Wednesday said it has obtained the Competition Commission of India's (CCI) approval on its bid for the debt-laden company while rival bidder, Dalmia Bharat said the reasons cited by the former for its bid were "misleading".
"A lot of apprehensions were raised by the Resolution Professional about UltraTech obtaining the CCI clearance on its bid for Binani Cement. CCI has today (Wednesday) cleared it. The company was rated the H2 bidder instead of H1 (highest bidder), for this reason," the Aditya Birla group company said in a regulatory filing.
According to it, the CCI clearance validates its contention that "they were wrongly and unjustifiably rated H2 instead of H1".
Rejecting this, Dalmia Cement (Bharat) Limited's Group CEO Mahendra Singhi said: "The reasons cited by the unsuccessful bidder for its failed bid, in stock exchange filings and press interviews, are misleading. We have made the highest financial bid and had also obtained the highest score in the evaluation."
He said the evaluation criteria for the bids was fair and made known to all the bidders before the bids.
"We state emphatically that the likelihood of obtaining the CCI approval by a bidder was not at all a criterion in bid evaluation. In fact, CCI approval was contemplated to be a post NCLT approval step and hence had been made a carved-out condition precedent to the resolution plans of all the resolution applicants," Singhi said.
He also said "the only criteria involving regulatory orders was whether any adverse regulatory order including an adverse CCI order imposing penalties had been passed against the bidder over the last 5 years".
"No evidence has been cited to show that the COC (Committee of Creditors) and its advisors did not make a correct assessment of bids," Singhi said.
During the ongoing insolvency proceedings of Binani Cement, Resolution Professional Vijaykumar V Iyer, submitted the resolution plan of Dalmia Bharat-controlled Rajputana Properties before the Kolkata bench of National Company Law Tribunal as the "highest bidder" to take it over.
Binani Industries, the parent company of insolvent company, had submitted the application before the tribunal seeking termination of insolvency proceedings against its cement manufacturing subsidiary and the company's counsel had said on Tuesday it could pay all its creditors within two weeks.
The move came after the company concluded a commercial understanding with the UltraTech Cement to sell its entire 98.43 per cent stake in its cement manufacturing subsidiary at a consideration of Rs 7,266 crore.
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Land deal linked money laundering case: Vadra appears before ED on day 2
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New Delhi (PTI): Robert Vadra, the businessman brother-in-law of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, appeared before the Enforcement Directorate on the second straight day on Tuesday for his questioning in a 2008 Haryana land deal linked money laundering case.
He was accompanied by his wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress MP from Kerala's Wayanad. The two exchanged hugs before Robert Vadra went inside the ED office.
He was questioned for about five hours on Tuesday and his statement was recorded by the federal probe agency under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), official sources said.
The session will resume on Wednesday, the sources said.
The 56-year-old Vadra had termed the ED action "political vendetta".
He said he has always cooperated with investigative agencies and has furnished huge amount of documents, stressing that there needs to be a closure in cases which are as old as 20 years.
The probe against Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana's Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram.
The land deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre land in Shikohpur from a firm named Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.
A Congress government led by chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power that time.
Four years later, in September, 2012, the company sold this 3.53 acre land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.
The land deal got into controversy in October, 2012 after IAS officer Ashok Khemka, then posted as the director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum- Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the mutation of this categorising the transaction as violative of state consolidation Act and some related procedures.
The opposition Haryana BJP then had called this case an instance of "corruption" in land deals and that of "nepotism" hinting at Vadra's kinship with the first family of the Congress party.
Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.
Vadra has been questioned multiple times by the federal probe agency in two different money laundering cases earlier.
