The audit of Amrapali's 46 firms over the past 10 years will be a 10-week exercise with the cataloguing of the voluminous and bulky records kept at nine places required to be broken down into year-wise and project-wise details for each company over the next 15 days.
The latest directive from the Supreme Court charted out a detailed course of action for the two forensic auditors in locating the paper trail to show how thousands of crores of rupees, invested by 46,000 homebuyers, got diverted.
The next 15 days will be a race against time both for the auditors — Ravi Bhatia and Pankaj Kumar Agarwal — and for the Chairman and Directors of the Amrapali Group who are currently in police custody. First, the directors will have to provide the required documents as and when asked for by the auditors within 15 days. After the completion of these 15 days, the auditing will have to finish auditing within a period of 50 days.
The records of the firm are kept at seven Amrapali properties in Noida and Greater Noida, and two other properties in Bihar. All of these properties were sealed by the top court on Wednesday.
The three arrested — Chairman Anil Kumar Sharma and Directors Shiv Priya and Ajay Kumar — too face the heat as the SC bench of Justices UU Lalit and DY Chandrachud issued suo moto contempt notices against them, the Amrapali companies and its Directors on Thursday. The matter has been posted for November 20.
The court made it clear that the conduct and cooperation offered by the arrested persons will determine the course of action in the contempt proceeding.
The trio will be moved to a hotel, while still in police custody, and will help the police and the auditors in further probe. They had moved the SC on Wednesday against staying in a lock-up. The SC had ruled that the trio will stay inside the police station till the time the audit is not completed but will not be put in a lock-up. However, the court revisited its order on Thursday and agreed to move them to a hotel room.
The trio will follow a strict routine in the hotel. They will have to assist the auditors gather all documents from all the sealed sites from 8 am to 6 pm. They will not be allowed to meet anybody, make any phone calls or use their mobile phones, which will be deposited with police.
Making its intent clear, the bench said, "We want to know the money trail leading to the missing Rs 2,600 crore." The court referred to the missing links which the company failed to show that marked depreciation of their financial assets over the years.
The two court-appointed auditors, who were present during the hearing, said that few men from Amrapali had come and dumped 40 cartons of documents at their office on Wednesday night. There was no inventory with those cartons. Some photographs of Amrapali offices, which showed documents scattered on the floor and unmaintained shelves were also furnished in the court. The auditors felt that no headway could be made for the next six months. Some of the premises where the auditors visited had no electricity supply and the office given to them had no toilet attached.
The bench said, "We see that cataloging will be a tough task."
The court allowed the arrested Amrapali bosses and auditors to employ adequate persons of their choice to ensure the task is completed within the time stipulated by it.
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