Sahara Group founder dies: Subrata Roy's wife, son are not Indian citizens, know about their citizenship

Sahara Group founder Subrata Roy died due to a cardiorespiratory arrest at a private hospital in Mumbai on Tuesday after a prolonged illness. He was 75. 

In his prime, Roy had made the Sahara Group a multi-billion dollar enterprise that counted itself among the biggest employers of the country.
He was also known to have friends among the famous and powerful across the fields of politics and Bollywood.

Having created a huge business empire across retail, real estate and financial services sectors, Roy was at the centre of a huge controversy and faced multiple regulatory and legal battles in connection with his group firms that were accused of circumventing regulations with Ponzi schemes, allegations his group always denied.

However, Very few people know that Subrata Roy's wife Swapna Roy and son Sushanto Roy had given up Indian citizenship and taken citizenship of Macedonia. 

As several cases were pending against the Roy family, they took the citizenship of Macedonia to escape Indian law.

How does Macedonia offer citizenship?

Macedonia is a country located in South Eastern Europe. Macedonia was previously part of Yugoslavia. It later became independent in 1991 and became a member of the United Nations in 1993. It provides citizenship to people for investment. According to a report, any citizen who wants to acquire Macedonian citizenship simply has to declare an investment of 4 lakh euros and employ 10 local people. By doing this, he/she can easily get Macedonian citizenship.

Apart from this, a foreigner who invests more than 40 thousand euros in real estate in Macedonia gets the right to stay for one year. Macedonia is doing this to reduce the unemployment rate in its country. The number of unemployed people in Macedonia is quite high.

According to reports, Subrata Roy Sahara had very good relations with Macedonia. He had also been the state guest of Macedonia several times. He had also proposed installing a large statue of Mother Teresa there and also proposed to build a casino there. 

Subrata Roy's troubles began in November 2010 when stock market regulator Sebi asked two entities of Sahara Group not to mobilise funds from equity markets or from issuance of any security to the public while restraining Roy from approaching the public to raise money.

Roy was arrested in 2014 on the orders of the Supreme Court after he failed to appear before it in a contempt case arising out of a non-refund of more than Rs 20,000 crore to investors by two of his companies. He was later granted bail but troubles continued for his various businesses.

(With PTI inputs)