Dubai: A Dubai court has ordered former billionaire and founder of the collapsed NMC Healthcare empire, B.R. Shetty, to pay approximately ₹408.5 crore ($46 million) to the State Bank of India (SBI) after a judge found he had repeatedly lied under oath.
The 83-year-old businessman had denied signing a personal guarantee for a $50 million loan granted to NMC Healthcare in 2018, alleging his signature was forged. However, the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) court dismissed his claims as “an incredible parade of lies” and his evidence as “incoherent and nonsensical.”
In a scathing 70-paragraph judgment, Justice Andrew Moran stated, “I am bound to find that there is overwhelming witness and documentary evidence before me, which satisfies me that Mr Shetty has come before this Court and lied on oath in his multiple denials that he signed the Personal Guarantee.” The court directed Shetty to pay SBI $45,997,554.59, which includes interest up to the judgment date, with an additional interest of 9 percent per annum until the payment is made.
Caught in a Web of Lies
Shetty’s defense unraveled when confronted with evidence that contradicted his testimony. Initially, he denied any knowledge of the loan but was forced to admit awareness after being shown a May 2020 email he had sent. He also denied ever meeting the SBI’s then-UAE CEO, Anantha Shenoy, who witnessed the guarantee’s signing. When presented with photographs of them together, Shetty bizarrely claimed the official must have “just come and stood there” while he posed for photos.
He further made a strange claim that NMC employees had once held a contest to see who could best copy his signature, with a “prize for the winner.” The judge called Shetty’s explanations “false and discreditable manoeuvring to evade liability.”
The Rise and Fall of an Empire
B.R. Shetty, who famously moved to Dubai with just $8, built a massive business empire starting with NMC Healthcare, the UAE’s first private healthcare provider. His fortunes took a dramatic turn in 2019 when US-based short-seller Muddy Waters Research accused his companies of hiding massive debt and forging financial documents.
The allegations led to a catastrophic plunge in his companies’ share prices, culminating in the sale of his ₹12,478 crore business to an Israeli-UAE consortium for the nominal sum of ₹74. Shetty quit NMC Health in 2020, and his accounts were subsequently frozen by the UAE government, marking the end of his business empire.
