Jet-Sahara dogfight reaches apex court

NEW DELHI: The legal battle between Jet Airways and the Sahara Group gathered momentum on Wednesday with both parties approaching the Supreme Court.

While Air Sahara filed a caveat in the apex court to prevent Jet Airways from getting any ex-parte order, the Naresh Goyal-owned airline filed a transfer petition.

Jet wants all ongoing cases relating to the filed Rs 2,300-crore deal transferred to the Mumbai High Court. Jet has contended that as per the arbitration agreement in the Jet-Sahara deal, the seat of arbitration would be Mumbai.

The Naresh Goyal-promoted carrier also sought a direction to stay all proceedings on the petition filed by Air Sahara in the Lucknow Court.

Alleging that Jet had terminated the contract, Sahara had moved the District Court in Lucknow on June 21 and sought an interim stay on operation of the escrow account and followed it up with another injunction on the sale of shares pledged by it to Jet for an advance of Rs 500 crore. The issue is slated to come up for hearing on June 30.

The airline also clarified that it did not blame the government for failure of the deal to take-off and had no complaints about any government policy. Jet Airways had on Tuesday described the collapse of its Rs 2,300 crore deal to acquire Air Sahara as ‘unfortunate’ and said that its decision not to salvage the pact was based purely on ‘commercial considerations’.

Both parties have lined up legal luminaries as the deal has moved from boardroom to courtroom over the last one week. Meanwhile, the Sahara group continued to pick up pieces of running their airline once more with depleted resources. Several of its aircraft continue to remain grounded due to want of spares, engineers and pilots.

The airline is now planning special incentive packages for travel agents to improve its marketing efforts. With lean season setting in from July, most industry players feel that the going for Sahara would get tougher. The biggest challenge would be to win back customer confidence.