Indian billionaire repays Kerala woman's ₹8 lakh loan after she’s evicted from her house

Lulu Group chairman MA Yusuff Ali has stepped in to help a Kerala woman who was evicted from her house due to an unpaid loan

Updated on: Oct 15, 2024, 08:01:45 IST

By Sanya Jain

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Lulu Group chairman MA Yusuff Ali has stepped in to help a Kerala woman who was evicted from her house due to an unpaid loan. The UAE-based, Kerala-born billionaire has not only instructed his team in India to repay the woman’s loan in full but also offered her ₹10 lakh. The promise of assistance from Lulu Group comes after Sandhya’s story made local news and moved thousands of people who could identify with her plight.

MA Yusuff Ali, the chairman of Lulu Group, stepped in to repay a family's loan. (Instagram/yusuffali.ma)

Here’s what happened

According to Malayalam Media, Sandhya and her husband took a loan from a private institution in 2019 for the construction of their home in North Paravur, Kerala. They took a loan of ₹4 lakh from Manappuram Finance, a Kerala-based Non Banking Financial Comapany (NBFC).

Around 2021, however, Sandhya’s husband left her and their two children. The repayment of the loan stopped thereafter, and the loan amount spiralled to nearly ₹8 lakh with interest.

Manappuram Finance started foreclosure proceedings after the repayments stopped. The NBFC said that Sandhya had been given four warnings after loan repayments stopped three years ago. Recently, when Sandhya returned from the cloth shop where she worked, she found that NBFC officials had entered her house and replaced her locks, officially evicting her and her two children. They were not even allowed to take their belongings from inside the house.

The aftermath

The sight of Sandhya and her children, stranded on the road, sparked outrage among locals. Her story was picked up by local media and reached MA Yusuff Ali, the chairman of Lulu Group, who immediately stepped in to help the family.

According to One India, MA Yusuff Ali instructed his team to repay the loan. It was due to his intervention that the keys to Sandhya’s house were returned to her. Lulu Group's media coordinator Swaraj handed over the keys to Sandhya and her family. They were also given ₹10 lakh to start a fixed deposit.

Sandhya expressed her gratitude to the billionaire, saying that she and her children would have been in dire straits had it not been for Yusuff Ali.

(Also read: ‘Humble’ Indian billionaire stops for selfie with fan in Abu Dhabi. Viral video)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sanya Jain
Sanya Jain is an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times Digital. She has nearly a decade of experience in covering offbeat stories that speak to the everyday experience - from viral videos to human interest copies that spark conversation. Her interests stretch across business, pop culture, social media trends, entertainment and global affairs. Before joining Hindustan Times, Sanya spent two years with Moneycontrol and five years with NDTV. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and a master’s in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. Sanya has a sharp eye for spotting emerging trends and looking for newsworthy angles to elevate viral posts into meaningful narratives. She was the first one, for example, to cover Narayana Murthy’s remark on 70-hour work weeks that sparked a national conversation. She is equally at ease writing about business leaders as about the common man, about issues of national importance and memes that amuse social media. Sanya enjoys speaking with content creators, newsmakers and entrepreneurs to transform everyday moments into engaging, slice-of-life stories that resonate with readers. When she is not working, Sanya can be found curled up with a good book. Born and raised in Lucknow, she has spent the last several years in Delhi. She is deeply interested in animal welfare and now spends a lot of her time running after her destructive orange cat.Read More

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