On the face of it, Ashish Deora—the Mumbai-based businessman, to whom Reliance Infocomm gifted, and then took away, a generous allotment of one crore shares at Re 1 a piece—says he’s not bitter that shares valued at Rs 700 crore are no longer his.‘‘I’m caught in the crossfire between some big people,’’ says the 30-year-old promoter of IOL Broadband Ltd.Deora was recently summoned by IDBI, which is re-examining a Rs 10-crore loan to his company in the light of media reports linking him to BJP leader Pramod Mahajan. Earlier this week, Reliance Infocomm denied any transaction with Mahajan.When asked, Deora is quick to say: ‘‘It is quite unfair to drag former telecom minister Pramod Mahajan into the picture. He has nothing to do with my company’s operations.’’But there is a connection. The son of a Marwari cotton trader, Deora studied at St Xavier’s school in Kolkata before moving to Mumbai to graduate in commerce. Five years ago, he set up IOL Broadband with Anand Rao—who would marry Mahajan’s daughter, Poonam, 21 months after the company’s inception.‘‘When Rao and I set up the company, we had no political connections or ambitions,’’ says Deora, who is the son-in-law of Mumbai real estate developer Kantibhai Govani. Govani is credited with making some of the buildings owned by Reliance—especially on the old textile mill lands.IOL Broadband was known as India Online Ltd, a BSE-listed loss-making firm which in its earlier avatar was called Natwar Synthetics.‘‘Even when the IDBI loans were approved to our company. Rao was not married,’’ says Deora. ‘‘So how can you say IDBI sanctioned loans to us due to Mahajan?’’ asks a calm and relaxed Deora.A resident of Worli, Deora says his company, in fact, did not avail of the entire Rs 19.35 crore loan which IDBI had sanctioned and just took Rs 10 crore to lay 100-km fibre optic network in Mumbai.Deora claims he has paid back Rs 6 crore of IDBI’s loan. ‘‘We have been paying back all our loans. Just on December 31, 2004, we paid Rs 35 lakh to IDBI. We have never defaulted,’’ he said after attending a day-long IT seminar in Mumbai.When asked why Reliance Infocomm would give him 1 crore shares for free, Deora says he has nothing to add to what Reliance Infocomm has already said in its news statement. ‘‘Please, I don’t want to add to confusion,’’ he says. He does clarify that the shares were offered to him and not to his company.Deora also did not explain what exactly his commitments to Reliance Infocomm were and why he failed to meet them. ‘‘The Reliance statement is quite explanatory,’’ he repeats.While justifying its largesse to Deora, Reliance Infocomm had said that he had prior expertise and experience in obtaining in-building permissions and associated right-of-way permissions that were used for its fibre-optic/broadband project in Greater Mumbai.Deora’s posh office (Global eSecure) is situated in the dilapidated Shriram Mills compound, which incidentally also houses the offices of Reliance Infocomm. Global eSecure shares its office address with Fairever, which received cheap Reliance Infocomm shares along with two other companies, Prerna Auto and Softnet Traders.Despite repeated requests, he refused to be photographed.
