In 2015, Ajay Singh paid just Rs 2 to buy a 58.46 per cent stake in SpiceJet from then promoter Kalanithi Maran and his investment company Kal Airways Pvt. Ltd.
The fact has come to light from disclosures made in the Delhi High Court’s judgement in a dispute between the two over convertible securities, according to a Bloomberg report.
Never before in India Inc.’s M&A history has a listed company been sold for less than Rs 5, the deal closed in 15 days and the acquirer exempted from the mandatory open offer to public shareholders, the report says.
According to the report, none of this information was disclosed by Singh, SpiceJet or Maran at the time of the transaction. Neither did market regulator Securities Exchange Board of India insist on a disclosure, allowing this to be the first-ever acquisition of a listed company with no price disclosure and at a 100 percent discount to its share price, the report says.
Bloomberg’s queries to Ajay Singh, Maran and SEBI chairman Ajay Tyagi remained unanswered.
Interestingly, two-and-a-half years after SpiceJet was grounded for its inability to pay a mere $2.2 million in fuel bills, the airline has now become the world’s best-performing airline stock.
SpiceJet shares are the best performers on a Bloomberg Intelligence index of airline stocks this year. The stock is up 124 per cent in 2017 and has gained more than 800 per cent since December 2014.
The credit for the turnaround goes to the company’s co-founder and chairman Ajay Singh. He injected capital, cut loss-making routes and aggressively added capacity.
