Amrapali project in Noida: Fully paid-up buyers told they have pending payments

The notice and associated problems with getting conveyance deeds registered represent the latest hurdle for homebuyers who have spent years hoping to move into their flats and later battled legal tangles due to Amrapali’s alleged financial misappropriations

On September 5, Amit Tiwari woke up to a rude shock. The 42-year-old insurance professional, owner of a flat in Noida’s Amrapali Sapphire housing project, figured in a list of 10,000-odd homebuyers in a newspaper advertisement. They had all been asked to enter their flat transaction details on an online portal and settle any outstanding amounts within 15 days. Failure to pay up, the advertisement warned, would result in cancellation of their flat allotments.

Residents of Amrapali Sapphire said there are around 50 flat owners in the society alone whose names appear on the list. (HT Archive)

Alarmed, Tiwari rushed to the office of the court receiver (CR) – senior advocate R Venkatramani who was appointed by the Supreme Court in July 2019 to revive and finish all Amrapali housing projects after the real estate developer went bankrupt in 2017-- who had issued the notice.

He explained he had paid the full amount of for his flat in Sapphire (as per builder buyer agreement), and its conveyance deed (a document that transfers property rights) was registered in 2020 after being duly verified and cleared by the court receiver himself. “I was told I had not paid ₹18,000 in service tax. But why would the builder (Amrapali) hand me over my flat without full payment?” he asked.

Tiwari isn’t alone.

Rajiv Punetha, who owns a flat in Amrapali Silicon City, is the first name on the list published on September 5. He said he had made full payment and has been living in the flat since 2015.

“There are around 50 flat owners in Amrapali Sapphire alone whose names appear on the list. All their papers have already been verified by the CR office, some once, some twice. At least 18 of them have even got their conveyance deeds registered with CR’s approval post verification,” said commodore R K Srivastava (retired), who heads the Apartment Owners’ Association of the housing society.

The notice and associated problems with getting conveyance deeds registered represent the latest hurdle for homebuyers who have spent years hoping to move into their flats and later battled legal tangles due to Amrapali’s alleged financial misappropriations.

Amrapali declared bankruptcy in 2017, plunging thousands of homebuyers in Noida and Greater Noida into uncertainty. On July 23, 2019, a two-member Supreme Court bench of justices Arun Mishra and UU Lalit ordered the arrest of promoters Anil Sharma and Shiv Priya, and tasked Venkatramani with reviving seven Amrapali projects in Noida and nine in Greater Noida, which are currently in various stages of development.

“It’s a classic case as it set the template for resolution of future disputes between developers and homebuyers. It’s the first case where the Supreme Court took it upon itself to complete the project. The only other template is the case of Unitech where its board of directors was dismissed and replaced with central government nominees for reconstruction of company assets,” said senior advocate ML Lahoty, who represents homebuyers in apex court proceedings.

And yet, for the 42,000 people whose dreams of owning a home were put in a limbo by Amrapali’s financial woes, the last two years have brought forth unexpected challenges.

Registration of deeds

At the time of the Supreme Court order in 2019, around 9,000 Amrapali homebuyers had already moved into their flats after making full payments. In the same order, the apex court also directed that conveyance deeds of all such buyers must be registered within a month.

Two years later, hardly 1,600 such deeds have been registered, mostly in the two phases of Amrapali Sapphire, Princely Estate and Platinum, all in Noida, according to data compiled by various residents’ associations. There is no data available on the number of registered deeds on the CR’s portal.

Many flat owners say that they are nowhere close to getting legal property rights documented despite endless rounds of document submission and scrutiny. “At least five camps for verification of papers have been held in Silicon City since the Supreme Court order, but we haven’t seen any real progress. No updated data is available. It’s unending torture,” a homebuyer said on condition of anonymity.

In a hearing in early 2019, before it appointed Venkatramani as court receiver, the apex court ordered a forensic audit of all transactions of Amrapali group. The report, which contains the list of “undervalued” flats and suspicious transactions, is yet to be put up on the CR’s portal.

To be sure, the challenges before Venkatramani were staggering. He had to walk on a legal minefield -- same unit sold to more than one persons, benami transactions, undervalued flats, owners untraceable, arbitrary change in areas of flats for which promoters collected money etc.

Another serious problem, allege a cross-section of homebuyers, is the retrospective pricing of flats. For instance, a buyer who managed to get a discount from the erstwhile promoters of Amrapali at the time of booking is being asked to pay the difference now, even though they have made full payments as per the builder-buyer agreement. “This amounts to altogether trashing a legal contract entered into buyer and seller years ago,” said a flat owner, not wishing to be identified.

Asked about the fate of homebuyers whose names appeared in the September 5 notice, Venkatramani said, “We are going slow on this. We will take our next action only after a committee appointed by the Supreme Court meets.” He didn’t give a timeline.

Stalled projects

Venkatramani informed the Supreme Court on September 3 that a consortium of six banks -- Bank of Baroda, Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, Bank of India, UCO Bank, and Punjab and Sind Bank-- had agreed to fund stalled Amrapali projects, which account for 33,000-odd housing units.

“We already have funds for works in six projects -- Silicon City-1, Silicon City-2, Crystal Homes, Centurion Low Rise, O2 Valley and Tropical Gardens. Work is going on smoothly and we hope to deliver units on time,” said KP Mahadeva Swamy, the executive director of NBCC (India) Ltd, a Navratna central public sector enterprise assigned the task of project monitoring and construction by the apex court in its July 2019 order.

But some residents of partially completed projects have raised doubts over the NBCC’s quality of work, complaining of waterfalls in basements, long power shutdowns without sufficient notice and general lack of accountability. “On September 11, there was a minor blast at the electrical substation at Silicon City that left two of the workers injured and around 10,000 residents in 2,500-odd flats sweating it out without power for over 17 hours. Over the last 2-3 months, the housing society has faced over 100 hours of power shutdowns announced at very short notices,” one of the residents said on condition of anonymity.

Asked for a response on NBCC’s working, Venkatramani declined to respond.

An NBCC official, asking not to be identified, blamed the delay on the lack of cooperation by electricity distribution companies and other agencies. The official, however, declined to comment on the poor quality of work.

Lahoty blamed the delay on paucity of funds despite the Supreme Court’s repeated pleas to the banks.

“For the last one year, the court has been asking banks to consider lending for Amrapali projects, but lenders have been shy of committing funds. In one of the recent hearings, the Supreme Court went to the extent of saying that the highest court of the land was the guarantor, after which banks have agreed to release loans. Things look bright now,” he added.

No Amrapali representative was available for comment as its directors are still in jail and its offices have been sealed.