Delhi High Court on Thursday dismissed BJP MP Subramanian Swamy’s petition against Air India The policy decision of the Center is not open to interference in judicial review in the absence of any illegality and arbitrariness being established by the disinvestment process and said the petitioner.
The court also said that the decision on disinvestment was taken after following a transparent process through multi-stage decision-making.
Air India’s disinvestment process began in June 2017. Tales Pvt Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Pvt Ltd, emerged as the highest bidder last year. Challenging the privatization process, Swamy had argued that there was an ongoing investigation against AirAsia, where one of the shareholders is AirAsia Investment Limited, Malaysia, and that he had direct and indirect control over Tales. They also argued that the bidding process was designed to facilitate Tales to take over Air India by entertaining the bid on behalf of SpiceJet, against which insolvency proceedings are pending before the Madras High Court. In the judgment pronounced on Thursday, a division bench of Chief Justice DN Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh said that neither Tata Sons nor Talas is facing any criminal proceedings in respect of a petition filed by Swamy in 2013 or in other case. . The bench said that it is an accepted case of Swamy that Tales is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons.
“Both [Talace] and Tata Sons Limited are Indian entities and hence, no question of violation of FDI policy arises. Further, AirAsia (India) Pvt Ltd has no interest in M/s Tales Pvt Ltd, which is the highest bidder,” the HC said.
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