BR Shetty: Barclays wins right to claw back $131m from NMC founder

UAE Exchange Centre reneged on a currency swap deal with the UK bank as crisis peaked in 2020

Barclays has won a court battle to retrieve $131m from Bavaguthu Raghuram Shetty over unpaid bills from his currency exchange business. Ravindranath K / The National

Barclays can enforce a $131 million judgment to recover unpaid bills from embattled NMC Health founder Bavaguthu Raghuram Shetty following the failure of a foreign exchange venture, a British judge has ruled.

The UK-based international bank had sought to claw back its losses after the businessman’s Abu Dhabi-based UAE Exchange Centre reneged on a currency-swap agreement in March 2020 with his empire on the brink of collapse.

Barclays gave UAEEC more than $129 million in less than a week but never received expected currencies in exchange as share trading in the parent company Finablr was suspended on the London Stock Exchange amid a massive accounting scandal.

A court in Dubai ruled in favour of the bank in April last year, prompting Barclays to go to the High Court in London to enforce the ruling and tap the cricket lover’s frozen assets around the world.

They include his only known English asset, a £4 million ($5.4m) penthouse flat close to the famous Lord’s Cricket Ground in north-west London. The flat is owned by Mr Shetty through a British Virgin Islands company, Multi Skies Ltd, according to land registry documents.

The Indian-born businessman, who signed a guarantee in 2015 to pay off any debts to Barclays incurred by the UAE Exchange Centre, had tried to delay the ruling, claiming that the bank was responsible for misconduct and had connived with fraudsters to rip off his company.

But judges in Dubai and London have rejected his claims and his request for further hearings into the debt. Mr Justice Henshaw on Monday said his attempt to put off his judgment was a “delaying tactic”.

Dr Shetty, who claims to be “financially paralysed” because of a series of freezing orders imposed by courts in the UK and India, said he would continue his legal battle.

The 79-year-old further claimed that he was “stranded in Mangalore” after being turned back by Indian border officials when he tried to return to the UAE in November 2020, according to the judgment.

A spokeswoman for his legal team said: “Dr Shetty shall be appealing this judgment”.

Finablr, a payments and foreign exchange group, lists UAE Exchange, Xpress Money, Unimoni, Remit2India and the Bayan Pay among its subsidiaries.

It also previously owned the Travelex foreign exchange business, bought by Mr Shetty for £1 billion in 2014, but it was taken over by its lenders in a restructuring deal agreed in July 2020.

Mr Shetty has accepted that “serious fraud and wrongdoing” had taken place at Finablr and NMC Health.

Mr Shetty has brought legal action in the US alleging that former executives siphoned off more than $5 billion over a period of years. He has further claimed that the former managers forged and signed off transactions without his knowledge, including the 2012 Barclays agreement.

But a judge in Dubai last year found that his claims about the forged document were “entirely without substance” and that there was “no evidence whatsoever” to suggest that Barclays had been involved in dishonesty or fraud.

The National has further revealed that NMC Health had signed off on payments to struggling businesses run by members of Mr Shetty’s family before the healthcare brand collapsed.

NMC Health, one of the biggest privately-owned healthcare groups in the UAE, had 200 healthcare units in 17 countries before being placed into administration in April last year.

It followed the discovery of more than $6.6 billion of debt, more than three times higher than the level in its last failed accounts.