to also hear the US ecommerce firm’s latest plea to stop Future Retail Ltd (FRL) from alienating its stores to Reliance Industries.
“The important thing is that this interim application has to be considered,” a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice NV Ramana said.
Harish Salve, the senior lawyer representing FRL, requested the court not to pass an order, and said he would provide “support” in taking up the case on a priority basis in the high court. He said the attorneys for the Future Group and Amazon would jointly make a request to Justice C Hari Shankar to first hear Amazon’s plea on Reliance taking over hundreds of properties where the Future Group operated its outlets.
Justice Hari Shankar of the high court is scheduled to hear the matter on Tuesday. The apex court asked both Amazon and FRL to update it Wednesday on the outcome.
Justice Hari Shankar is also hearing the Amazon-Future Group cases on a fast-track basis after the Supreme Court in February asked the Delhi High Court to hear the petitions again and on merit. Amazon had sought to enforce a Singapore-based arbitral tribunal’s order
staying the sale of Future Group’s retail assets to Reliance Retail.
Meanwhile, Amazon has accused Reliance of being in “collusion” with FRL to transfer 835 FRL stores to Reliance.
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“The purported arrangements entered into by FRL with the MDA (Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani) Group constitute a stratagem to alienate FRL’s retail stores in favour of the MDA Group in a clandestine manner,” Amazon said in its petition to the Supreme Court, filed on Saturday to prevent FRL from completing the transferring process of stores to Reliance.
Reliance and FRL did not respond to ET’s request for comment till press time Monday.
In February, Reliance Projects & Property Management, a unit of Reliance Industries, had
taken possession of the properties of Future Group outlets for alleged non-payment of rents for more than a year. Reliance Projects had allowed the Future Group to operate on a “leave and licence” basis from these sites, after forking out the retailer’s unpaid rentals to individual landlords and transferring the leases to its own name. In a letter to FRL, Reliance has claimed the unpaid rents to it at Rs 4,800 crore.
