Hyderabad: Registrar of Companies (RoC) officials on Friday carried out a site inspection at Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills and identified 47 companies belonging to the Navayuga group at the same address. The Visakhapatnam-headquartered group and its corporate office in Hyderabad with Navayuga Engineering Company Ltd (NECL) as its flagship company.
A senior official from RoC-Hyderabad said, “We noticed that all these 47 companies had the same address and completed physical verification.” The site inspection is expected to continue as three more locations are under RoC radar.
The group has over 100 firms, many of their boards have retired IAS and IPS officers, including some who opted for VRS. It has regional offices in New Delhi, Kolkata, Patna and Bengaluru, Qatar and the UAE. The Vizag-headquartered group has its corporate office in Hyderabad and Navayuga Engineer-ing Company Ltd (NECL) is its flagship infrastructure company. The Navayuga group was in the news earlier when its chairman C. Visweswara Rao was questioned by the CBI in the Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy disproportinate assets case in May 2012.
That case involved Matrix Enport, owned by Mr Nimmagadda Prasad, selling huge stakes in Vanpic Ports Limited to the NECL without informing the state government and in violation of the initial MoU. A senior official from RoC-Hyderabad said, “We noticed that all these 47 companies are with same address and have completed physical verification. We will report it to the finance ministry.”
The inspection is expe-cted to continue as three more locations are under the RoC radar.
The RoC has served 13,607 notices to firms that were not complying with norms such as submitting annual reports, filing I-T and GST returns. “So far this year, we have struck off 25,000 companies against 15,000 in 2017,” the official said. In the Jagan Mohan Reddy assets case, the CBI had alleged that Mr Prasad had sold equity to Navayuga in 2011.
It charged that the deviations in the concession agreement permitted a dilution of the Ras Al Khaima share to 26 per cent, facilitating the entry of Navayuga Engineering into the Vanpic Ports Limited. Navayuga had thus cornered 65 per cent of equity and got control of the twin ports project, the CBI alleged. Navayuga gained control over the project without going through the open competitive bidding process, it claimed. The government issued a notice to Vanpic Ports, asking why it had diluted the equity structure and taken Navayuga on board without permission.
