India’s roster of private companies is littered with shell companies, shelf companies, and companies with weird names that have nothing to do with their supposed line of work, and often have no meaning whatsoever. Although many of them operate in legally dubious manners – or don’t really ‘operate’ in any meaningful sense of the word – their obscurity means we don’t normally get to hear about them.
One such company is Karanja Infrastructure Private Limited. This is a company which:
- has ties to companies in the private defence sector, including Nikhil Gandhi’s and Anil Ambani’s;
- is owned by a company in Mauritius, Blackstone Capital Limited, and gets foreign investment from this company from time to time;
- has few assets and very little revenue (it has actually gone entire years without any income at all);
- has massive, unexplained unsecured debts to the tune of Rs 380 crore, and for which they pay no interest;
- gives out large capital advances (around Rs 260 crore) to random companies; and
- has been ensuring debt-ridden companies get loans worth hundreds of crores from banks, by guaranteeing the loans against its properties (the value of which comes to barely Rs 63 crores).
For different people reading this, it’ll be ringing different alarm bells. If you are an accountant, you’d would look at its balance sheet and wonder how the company survives. If you’re a lawyer, you’d look at those unsecured debts and wonder how the company hasn’t fallen foul of laws that don’t allow interest-free loans.
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