| DSK Group | |
| Type: | Private |
| Location: | DSK House, Jangli Maharaj Road, Pune, India |
| Area Served: | Worldwide |
| Key People: | D.S. Kulkarni |
| Industry: | Conglomerate |
The DSK Group was a business conglomerate headquartered in Pune, India, having its presence in domains including real estate, automobile, technology, sports, information technology, and education. The Group was founded by Deepak Sakharam Kulkarni, born and studied in Pune, is the Chairman and Managing Director of the Group.[1] The Group was a multi-crore business with a turnover of over INR 4,000 crores.[2] It had operations in India (Pune, Mumbai, Nashik, Bengaluru and Chennai) and the US.[3]
Trouble for the group started in the May 2016 after Mr. DSK narrowly escaped an accident on the Pune-Mumbai Expressway. He got away with a few injuries but his driver died on the spot. In October of 2016, the group defaulted on its payments to fixed deposit holders. The realtor blamed this default on the slowdown of his real estate business, which, he said, was because of “the news about my accident spreading panic in the market.”As the payments stopped for subsequent months as well, the depositors got restive and some of them protested outside the builder’s office on the busy Jangli Maharaj Road. A few of them also approached RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar, who started blogging about the company’s deals. In his first blog, Kumbhar had alleged that the fixed deposit scheme run by Mr.DSK did not have sanction of the Reserve Bank of India. He also alleged shady land deals by his family members at the expense of the public listed company, DSK Developers Limited (DSKDL).In a press conference in Pune in November, Mr.DSK refuted these allegations. But by that time, news had started trickling in of the company’s attempts to offload its Toyota arm, in order to raise money to pay the depositors. Work in many of the ongoing projects were also stalled, with flat buyers threatening to go to the police against the builder. In the meantime, depositors, many of them senior citizens, organised themselves and contemplated legal action & first of the many FIRs against the builder was filed with the Pune City Police. The Economic Offences Wing wrote to the Inspector General of Registration, asking it to keep the police informed in case the company made any property transfers. Two more FIRs followed.Construction on the company’s DreamCity project, a 8,000-crore integrated township spread over 300 acres of land on the Pune-Solapur Road, came to a halt, amid allegations of unfair land deals by his family members. Surrounded by problems from all sides, Mr.DSK blamed circumstances — the slowdown in real-estate sector and demonetisation — for his company’s woes. But he kept assuring his investors that he was not running away and would pay back all their dues. He even got MNS chief Raj Thackeray to support him. Thackeray held a meeting with protesting depositors in November and asked them to trust the builder. He claimed that ‘non-Marathi businessmen backed by politicians’ were trying to destroy DSK.In his press conference in November, DSK had said, “If you take the assets of the construction group, it amounts to above Rs 9,000 crore, and our dues hardly stand at Rs 1,500 crore. The total dues of the fixed deposit holders is only Rs 589 crore, which is due in 2020. So there is no question of not paying them”. “We have made a plan for timely payout of our deposit holders and once the court gives us the green signal, we will start…,” he had claimed. But when the courts did ask him to pay, all he offered was promises. On December 4, he told the Bombay High Court he would pay Rs 50 crore as security within 15 days. After that, he managed to obtain a further four-weeks’ time from the Supreme Court. In the third week of January, the company told the Bombay High Court that the amount was being transferred from a bank in Singapore. It claimed that the transaction had already been initiated and would be credited to its domestic accounts within three days. That also turned out to be a false assurance.Mr.DSK held another press conference on February 8, this time claiming that his company was in the process of raising money through crowdfunding. On Thursday, the Bombay High Court finally decided that enough was enough & that it could not trust DSK any further. It withdrew its protection from arrest it had granted to the builder all this while, & within hours, the Pune Police nabbed him from Delhi.[4]
The Supreme Court on 27th July 2022 granted bail to Mr. DSK. The apex court bench of Justice S Abdul Nazeer & Justice J K Maheshwari said in a brief order -"Having heard learned counsel for the parties and having perused the record, we are of the view that the petitioner (DSK) be released on bail, therefore, we direct the release of the petitioner on bail subject to the conditions to be imposed by the trial court."[5]