Refund problems

Institutional shareholders of Stock Holding Corp of India Ltd (SHCIL) met last week to take stock of various decisions of Jayaraman Iyer, the chairman and managing director who has been sent on leave. The Indian Express has reported many of these, but new ones continue to crop up. One such is a complaint by senior citizen Maria Teresa Menezes, who has complained to the consumer court that SHCIL sent her a refund cheque of Rs 17,000 long after she had invested Rs 250,000 in 8 per cent RBI Relief Bonds. She was told this was the “excess amount invested minus interest already paid” to her. On approaching the forum, she learns from SHCIL’s submissions that it was returning the money in accordance with RBI directions. The RBI letter only reveals that SHCIL had bungled in handling the bond subscription but does not instruct SHCIL to refund any money. It had collected money from 107 single applicants and 185 multiple applicants with no retirement benefits. The RBI has now forwarded these complaints to the appropriate department to examine the 250 odd rejections and refunds. Sources say that RBI must check the three-way reconciliation in the Bond Ledger Account between the clearing bank, SHCIL and RBI and how the refunds were made.

Rejected again

The Kolkata police, who have been doggedly pursuing the Dinesh Dalmia case, scored another victory last week, through an appeal filed by the West Bengal government over interpretation of Sec 167 of the Criminal Procedure Code. They challenged a High Court order in the Supreme Court over the commencement of custody, which yielded an important ruling. The apex court rejected Dalmia’s contentions, which had been accepted by the High Court to grant him bail. It ruled that surrender of an accused before a judicial magistrate cannot be taken as a starting point for counting the maximum 15 days’ police remand of an accused, or for the subsequent detention in judicial custody. This means that custody would start only when the accused was formally arraigned. The court further clarified that if a person is an accused in two different cases, then detention in one cannot be taken into consideration while determining the detention in the other case.