Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharma To Meet SEBI Chairman; Assert that Whistleblower Info Is Old

Debashis Basu 23 January 2019

Dilip Shanghvi, chairman and managing director (CMD) of Sun Pharmaceuticals is supposed to meet Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) chairman Ajay Tyagi this afternoon. Moneylife learns that Mr Shangvi is likely to assert that all the information contained in the two complaints filed by a whistleblower submitted to SEBI, are old information that is pertaining to a period of 10-15 years ago, and have no relevance today. We gather that the Sun Pharma CMD is likely to point out that the complaints have been instigated by business rivals.

Separately, Sun Pharma has said that SEBI has indeed asked the company replied to two queries asked by the market regulator, but the company is not in a position to comment whether these queries were related to the whistleblower complaints.

Moneylife alone has the whistleblower complaints and we can affirm that information pertains to the past few years and not to 10-15 years ago. In this article, for instance, we have pointed out that in just over three years, between 2014 and 2017, Aditya Medisales Ltd (AML) has had over Rs5,800 crore of transactions with Suraksha Realty, controlled by Sun Pharma’s co-promoter, Sudhir Valia. (Read: Sun Whistleblower Complaint to SEBl – 2: Huge Transactions between Aditya Medisales and Private Companies of Sun’s Promoters)

This information pertains to only one group company, viz., Suraksha Realty. According to the whistleblower, Sun Pharma’s promoter Dilip Shanghvi and his brother-in-law Sudhir Valia control over 250 companies and hundreds of bank accounts. None of this information is old. It is all current information.

The whistleblower has attached 50 pages of statements of Suraksha Realty’s ICICI Bank account and 20 pages of its Yes Bank account covering 2014-17, to prove his point.

It may be recalled that in the conference call held in early December also, Sun Pharma had tried to characterise the swirling questions about its governance as more than a decade old.

The fact is that the relationship with AML is current. AML gets all its money from distributing the products of the publicly-listed Sun Pharma. Sun Pharma’s promoters have always controlled AML; but chose to declare it as a related party only in 2018.

In effect, a huge amount of money generated from the publicly-listed Sun Pharma is going in and out of the personal unlisted companies of Sun Pharma’s promoters, through a distributor controlled by them privately.

You may also want to read…

New 172-page Whistleblower Complaint to SEBl Documents Sun Pharma’s Nexus with Aditya Medisales – I

Sun Whistleblower Complaint to SEBl – 2: Huge Transactions between Aditya Medisales and Private Companies of Sun’s Promoters

Statement by Moneylife on Sun Pharma’s Allegations

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