Securities and Exchange Board of India spends Rs 60 crore on Sahara ‘hunt’

New Delhi: Securities and Exchange Board of India's quest to locate genuine Sahara investors may be turning largely futile, but the entire process has become a very costly affair for the regulator and its expenses may rise further next year from about Rs 60 crore estimated for the current fiscal.

In the high-profile case involving refund of over Rs 24,000 crore and additional interest of 15 per cent per annum, the Supreme Court had asked Sahara in August 2012 to submit all documents and refund money to Sebi for further repayments to genuine investors after verifying the documents. Sebi feels that the storage cost payable for the documents submitted by the Sahara Group will go up further in the next fiscal 2014-15 due to receipt of additional documents, such as property title deeds submitted by the Sahara, as also due to storage of scanned images, sources said.

The Supreme Court had ordered that all expenses incurred by Sebi in the refund process would be incurred by the Sahara. The regulator has now sought a permission to use a portion of Rs 5,120 crore deposited by Saharas for refund to investors for settling expenses incurred or to be incurred. Sebi has completed the work of scanning all these documents and has created computer files running into a total size of 70 terabytes.