New Delhi (India), 6th May 2023: The Supreme Court denied bail for Anil Kumar Sharma, the jailed former CMD of Amrapali Group of Companies, stating he did not deserve “sympathy” after stealing thousands of homeowners’ hard-earned money and life savings.
The bench, which included Justices Ajay Rastogi and Bela M Trivedi, refused to send a notice to the prosecuting agency on Sharma’s bail request, despite the fact that he had been imprisoned for more than four years in the case.
They said, “”You have cheated thousands of homebuyers. You siphoned off their hard-earned money and their life savings. You do not deserve any sympathy.”
The bench further added, “Yours is not a case of simple cheating. See the plight of thousands of home buyers. You cannot have our sympathy. You better enjoy being in jail… This court is very aware of what you did. You created the mess and we are not able to find a way out of it. A large number of home buyers are suffering.”
The former CMD of the real estate business and other directors of the firm were arrested on the orders of the Supreme Court after a forensic audit report revealed that the management syphoned off a huge sum of money from property buyers.
Previously, the Supreme Court granted Sharma interim bail for a few weeks on medical reasons.
Sharma and others have been imprisoned since their arrest in 2018 for a variety of offences, including cheating, criminal breach of trust, and money laundering, and have been there for nearly four years.
In a July 23, 2019 verdict, the Supreme Court slammed errant builders for betraying home buyers’ trust, ordering the cancellation of the Amrapali Group’s registration under real estate law RERA and evicting it from prime properties in the national capital region (NCR) by voiding the land leases.
The Supreme Court ordered the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to investigate alleged money laundering by realtors, granting relief to over 42,000 Amrapali Group home buyers.
