Banks suggest ways to resolve litigation over Future Retail

Pushing ownership over the litigation-mired assets of Future Retail (FRL) owned by the beleaguered Kishore Biyani-led group, a consortium of 27 banks told the Supreme Court that the best way out of the present mess is to ask both Reliance Retail and Amazon to make open competitive bids for the assets, with a base price of £1.7 billion.
The consortium, which also included 10 private and three foreign banks, through senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, told the SC bench that the current outstanding against FRL is around £1.7 billion and that the loans were advanced between 2015 and 2020, much before Amazon initiated arbitration proceedings to shut out Reliance from acquiring Future’s retail chain of stories.
“Since loans and repayments were governed by separate agreements between banks and FRL, both Amazon and Reliance can have no say on the manner in which the banks, which are repositories of public money, want to monetise FRL assets. The contracts - Future Coupons’ with Amazon and FRL’s with Reliance - are private in nature but the agreement between FRL and banks involve public interest,” Dwivedi said.