[Business Today]

Published date: 4th Mar 2012

Gurdeep Singh Chadha – “Ponty” to those who nod at and fear him – is not an easy man to know. Many say the tax raids on Chadha’s 25 offices and houses in Delhi, Lucknow and Moradabad, which yielded a reported `100 crore, if not more, are an indication of his political affiliations. His 4,500- acre Wave City in Uttar Pradesh – just one of many real estate projects – has gone from strength to strength under Mayawati’s government in the past five years. His sugar businesses in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have grown 106 per cent in the last four years, according to his company’s website. Such growth would be impossible to achieve without deep political interweave, especially in up, where sugar is a major election issue.

Wave Infratech, the real estate arm of Chadha’s Wave Inc. group, has denied reports that cash was seized from a mall owned by him in Noida, up. Wave Infratech says that group companies have been paying taxes regularly and meeting other statutory requirements.
Wave Inc., set up 49 years ago by Chadha’s father, Kulwant Singh, started out as a small sugarcane processing business. Today, besides sugar factories, the group owns multiplex cinemas, paper mills, bottling plants, power plants, and real estate projects from Hyderabad to Mohali. Chadha, who is disabled in both arms, is among North India’s most powerful liquor barons. He has distilleries in up and Punjab, and the Mayawati government has granted his group sole distributorship for liquor and three sugar mills.

Alongside whispers of his deep political ties across party lines, from Punjab Pradesh Congress President Amarinder Singh to Samajwadi Party President Mulayam Singh Yadav, is the buzz that Ramesh Pokhriya l Nishank was removed from his post as chief minister of Uttarakhand on grounds of corruption after mega hydropower projects were awarded to Chadha’s company.

“It almost seemed like laws were drafted to favour this man,” said a source in the bottling industry. Wave is one of Coca-Cola’s nine bottling franchisees. Chadha, the story goes, can bend the law not just for multi-crore projects, but also for lesser things. When ₹1 crore went missing from his Jalandhar office in 2005, Chadha’s clout ensured that police worked non-stop, and the culprit, a security guard, was caught within 24 hours.

As he has risen to wealth and influence, many of his former friends have become foes, including some close family members. He and his brothers have serious disagreements about his style of business. His rise began when Yadav was chief minister of up – it was the Samajwadi Party chief who inaugurated the Wave multiplex in Lucknow. But when Mayawati stormed to power, Chadha won favour with the Bahujan Samaj Party government. And now, with early indications of a regime change in Lucknow, raids on Chadha territory do not seem surprising.

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