SOS Intimation regarding Infringement of Business-Related Human Rights of Indian Citizens in the DHFL Scam: A Letter to the OHCHR (UN)

Posted on 25th June, 2024 (GMT 16:15 hrs)

Introduction: Few of the OBMA activists sent this letter to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), United Nations, intimating the said international body regarding the status and briefing of the DHFL Scam as a case of financial abuse in a summarized manner on 11th June, 2024, citing the necessary details of the case and urging for suggestions/advices/recommendations on the future course of action.

Dr. Volker Türk,

The High Commissioner for Human Rights,

United Nations

Sub: SOS Intimation regarding Infringement of Business-Related Human Rights of Indian Citizens in the Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL) Scam

We, the victims of financial abuse, are calling you from a wounded country⤡, viz., India, where human rights are infringed⤡ at all quarters, be it business rights, gender rights or minority rights. Please consider this letter as an SOS call from distressed, aggravated as well as helpless fixed deposit and NCD holders of a particular non-banking finance company.

Dear Dr. Türk,

This is to inform you regarding an urgent matter that concerns financial abuse or the contravention of business-related human rights as recognized in the 2011 United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework), especially with regard to the section “Access to Remedy” (Chapter III).

The issue-at-hand relates to the DHFL scam in India that was exposed back in 2019, which resulted from the state-business nexus through terror-funding/political charity/political donation in collusion with a chain of internationally operative gangsters such as Dawood Ibrahim, late Iqbal Mirchi⤡ and so on. In the scenario that unfolded, there was no “business respect” for the international human rights of the small investors, viz., lakhs of common Indian citizens, who had invested their hard-earned life-time savings into this AAA-rated non-banking financial company (NBFC), i.e., a shadow bank that even has had esteemed institutional investors such as the Ramakrishna Mission Ashram, the Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (UPPCL), Indian Air Force Group Insurance Society and many other Jesuit organizations. We have already notified you regarding this case in conjunction with other very important domestic public servants through an online mass petition in May 2023:

· Praying for taking Suo Moto Cognizance for the DHFL Scam Victims VIEW HERE ⤡

To further notify you: the DHFL underwent a resolution process under the ill-conceived Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC, 2016) from 2019 to 2021 under the supervision cum administration of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-appointed Committee of Creditors (CoC) that caused significant haircuts for the thousands of fixed deposit holders (yielding them back only a meagre 23.07% from their total invested amount), following which the company was supposedly handed over to Mr. Ajay Piramal, a very close associate⤡ of the then crony ruling party (which is also the richest political party even having disputed sources of donations, as recently revealed through the Electoral Bonds Scam⤡) of India, viz., the religious extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Mr. Piramal allegedly bought the “beleaguered” DHFL’s 45k crore worth of assets by spending only a rupee. It seems that the DHFL was forcibly put under the IBC deliberately like a “litmus test” in order to legitimize the said code (which has been amended multiple times) in its operation so as not to set a “bad precedent” by putting the DHFL victims into the Orwellian laboratory state as metaphorical guinea pigs, who could be mercilessly experimented upon!

· DHFL the (N)BFC, RBI’s Decree and the “Bad Precedent” (?)VIEW HERE ⤡

· DHFL Victims in the Laboratory State of IBC: “Litmus Test”? VIEW HERE ⤡

However, the concerning factor here is that there are multiple legal cases that are still pending at the Supreme Court of India with regard to the DHFL issue, that includes individual as well as institutional stakeholders. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) ruled on 27th January, 2022, that the entire resolution process as headed by the RBI-appointed CoC is “contrary to law, consisting of material irregularities and void ab initio”. Consequently, Mr. Piramal managed to get an ex parte stay order (on 11th April, 2022) to this verdict and continued to claim ownership of the company at the expense of the life-savings of the FD and Non-Convertible Debenture (NCD) holders. However, given that the granted stay order was only a partial, temporary one and not a ‘blanket’ stay order, the DHFL case is still pending at the apex court of law with cases filed by 63 Moons’ Technologies Limited, the Sasakawa Leprosy Foundation, the ex-promoters of DHFL, certain individual FD holders etc., against the so-called “approved” resolution plan of Mr. Piramal. It must be noted here that Mr. Piramal got the approval for his plan on 7th June, 2021, from the lowest quasi-judicial body, viz., the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), which by no means rules out the possibility of the change of terms in the plan in the further ranks of the judicial hierarchy in order to conduce to the collective demands of the suffering victims of the resolution process orchestrated by the RBI with the help of the BJP. No human rights obligations are met in the course of this entire spectrum of financial abuse, constituting an adverse human rights impact. No human rights due diligence has been carried out by Mr. Piramal’s company, viz., the Piramal Capital and Housing Finance Limited (PCHFL). How can Mr. Piramal claim to be the owner of the DHFL when a number of cases are still awaiting final verdict at the apex stratum of the judiciary, i.e., when it is still under adjudication? No meaningful consultation (through engagement and dialogue) has been done with the affected groups of victims or stakeholders in this case so far as the question of their monetary subsistence as well as the future sustenance is concerned by taking the appropriate mode of action.

We have already approached the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), India, notifying our case, but we have received no viable response from them.

· FINANCIAL ABUSE OF THE DHFL VICTIMS BY THE CoC FOR DHFL: COMPLAINT TO THE NHRC VIEW HERE ⤡ ⤡ ⤡

We would like you to kindly go through the following hyperlinked documents by spending some of your valuable time in order to generate more up-to-date details or information about the DHFL Scam in terms of its history and whereabouts (sorry for troubling you with such URLs):

· A WHITE PAPER ON THE DEWAN HOUSING FINANCE CORPORATION LTD. (DHFL) VIEW HERE ⤡

· THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE DHFL SCAM VIEW HERE ⤡

· URGING FOR THE HASTENED RESOLUTION OF THE CASES RELATED TO THE DHFL: A LETTER TO THE HON’BLE CJI VIEW HERE ⤡ (For the List of Pending Cases)

In conclusion, this letter is being written to your honourable counsel to seek suggestions, as a family of financially abused victims of the DHFL scam, as to what should be the further course of action on our part in this regard. We are aware that the domestic remedies are not yet exhausted, however, given the lag of the judicial process (the multi-layered corruption of the judicial process is not a new affair in India, which often has to act under political pressures as well as from prominent business-actors such as Mr. Piramal, who is a close kin of Mr. Mukesh Ambani, the BJP’s favoured business tycoon. This has made us lose our faith in the sanctity of the domestic judicial processes⤡) and the utter uncertainty that besmirches the lives of the DHFL victims, we are seeking a suitable recourse to the statutes of the international human rights.

It is paradoxical enough that Mr. Piramal’s Company, i.e., the PCHFL, is claiming itself to be the absolute, unchallenged owner of the DHFL on all their platforms. Hence, it could be said in this sense that all the domestic remedies have already been exhausted and Mr. Piramal is now the new owner. In that case, the applicability of international law becomes pertinent more than ever. However, at the same time and as mentioned previously, the pending legal cases make the DHFL scam an ongoing crisis-point as well. This kind of paradox debars us from lodging a direct complaint in your respected international forum. We are seemingly stuck in the horns of this dilemma. This kind of perplexing situation is only rendered possible under the auto-theocratic regime of the BJP!

We request you to kindly advice us in this connection in order to relieve us of our painstaking misery and suffering, which has been continuing for the last five years. We request you to kindly tell us whether there is indeed a scope for the implementation of the remedial grievance redressal mechanisms of the OHCHR, since this issue entails a loss of entitlement of the DHFL victims as an aggrieved community. Although it is a mere truism that “International law is the vanishing point of jurisprudence”, yet if the sovereign government cuts a sorry figure to implement all the procedures to uphold international business-related rights of its citizens, a financially abused person would be compelled to take his/her/their recourse to the vanishing point, i.e., parallel international “law” (?) without hampering the sovereignty of the imagined nation state. In doing so, the state must be compelled to fulfill its international human rights obligations.