National Herald case: Shanti Bhushan to challenge 'illegal' transfer of AJL shares

Swamy claims that Sonia and Rahul floated Young Indian which bought Associated Journals Limited, publisher of National Herald and the company was shut down by Sonia.

Associated Journals Private Limited (AJL), a public limited company with immovable assets, formally closed printing and publication of newspapers like The National Herald, etc, in April 2008. The Gandhi family has 9.02 crore shares or 98.98 percent in AJL.

The AJL has total assets worth about Rs 5,000 crore, media reports said.

"Filing such cases show that government's fear that it can not defeat the Congress, and people like Subramanian Swamy have been kept in the BJP for such acts", Sibal said. "Jawaharlal Nehru had three preferential shares worth Rs 300, my father had five preferential shares worth Rs 500 and Kailash Nath Katju had seven preferential shares and 131 ordinary shares worth Rs 2,000", he said.

He also added, "This process of getting signatures of legal heirs will take some time". But he said none of the heirs of the original shareholders would want to cash in on the shares.

In an article, Jaitley had said that Rs 90 crore from the funds collected by the Congress Party were given to the newspaper company AJL and eventually that tax exempted money effectively got transferred to a real estate company, which acquired 99 per cent of the share-holding of the former newspaper company.

Since the transaction involved indirect ownership of the real estate assets in prime locations in Delhi and Mumbai, the opposition took up this issue in Parliament after a Delhi court summoned Congress President Sonia Gandhi and her son and party Vice-President, Rahul Gandhi for appearance. He also told that Markandey Katju didn't applied to become shareholder. If he indeed was a shareholder, why didn't he, so far, attend the AJHL shareholders' meeting so far?

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