Good businessman or bad? Five questions to Jay Amit Shah

Jay Amit Shah, the 33-year-old son of the BJP national president, is actually a bad businessman. That is the argument offered all through Sunday by BJP supporters who tried to ridicule the report in thewire.in which appeared under the headline, “The golden touch of Jay Amit Shah”.

If indeed Shah junior had a golden touch, an article in Opindia.com argues, his company in question would not have suffered losses year after year. Incorporated in 2004, as both the report in The Wire and OpIndia reveal, the firm recorded losses of six thousand Rupees and one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-four Rupees between 2012-2014 before registering a profit of a paltry 18,728 Rupees in the year 2014-15.

The next year too, when the firm suddenly secured loans worth ₹30-40 crore from right, left and centre (a cooperative bank, a PSU and the firm of a family friend) and when the turnover of Temple Enterprises Private Limited zoomed to over ₹80 Crore from the previous year’s turnover of ₹50 thousand, the firm still ended the financial year with a loss of one crore and forty-eight lakh Rupees.

The losses were cited as the reason for the firm going out of business in 2016, when it was shut down. So, where was his golden touch?

But the controversy and the defence are yet to provide answers to the following questions:

• If Temple Enterprises was registered in 2004 to trade and export agricultural produce, why was the volume of trade so low (₹50,000 in 2014-15), exports so little and losses so regular?
• Why wasn’t the firm shut down earlier?
• What did the firm export and to which countries in 2015-16 worth ₹80 crore?
• For a modest, loss-making firm with a turnover of just ₹50,000 in 2014-15, what triggered the huge risk of securing loans worth ₹30-40 crore?
• Judging by the explanation offered by Railway Minister Piyush Goyal and the BJP, the loans were repaid with interest within a year or so even after the firm recorded losses worth ₹1.48 crore. What was the hurry?

There are other, equally pertinent, questions which the BJP and Piyush Goyal have not answered yet. For example, how another firm of Shah Junior which is into brokerage, was given a loan by a PSU by breaking its own rules for setting up a renewable energy plant with no experience in the business.