Among other corporate czars who had a tough going in the top court was Subrata Roy Sahara as he battled throughout the year to meet the directives in connection with the refund of around Rs 40,000 crore to investors. High profile corporate-legal cases involving politician-businessmen nexus stole the show in year 2017 in the Supreme Court, which dealt with sensitive issues of the Birla-Sahara diary on alleged payments to top politicians and absconders like liquor baron Vijay Mallya. The PIL on Birla-Sahara diary, which witnessed high-voltage hearings, was trashed as the case based on “random materials” like loose sheets, papers, e-mail printouts was “meritless”, but Mallya had a hard luck in the apex court. So was the case of real estate majors like Unitech, Jaypee, Supertech, Amrapali and Parsvnath against whom the top court acted tough giving middle class investors a much-needed confidence that their hard-earned money will be protected. During the year, Mallya, who faced Rs 9,000 crore loan default and fled the country last year amidst trading of charges among political parties, was held guilty of contempt by the apex court for his failure to furnish details of all his assets to lending banks. His case and those of some other businessmen, who never returned to the country after giving undertakings, came in the wake of some other business tycoons, who were named as accused in other cases, seeking permission to travel abroad. Among other corporate czars who had a tough going in the top court was Subrata Roy Sahara as he battled throughout the year to meet the directives in connection with the refund of around Rs 40,000 crore to investors. However, Roy, who was once a partner of Mallya in Formula one, had a better luck as he managed to keep himself away from jail from where he was released on parole in 2016 and survived several warnings from the top court where he failed to prevent auctioning of his prime property at Pune’s Aamby Valley. The most politically prominent among the cases concerned Karti Chidambaram, son of former union finance minister and Congress leader P Chidamabaram, who had to toil hard to get the court’s nod to visit the United Kingdom for his daughter’s admission in the Cambridge university there. Karti is facing a CBI probe into alleged irregularities in the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the finance minister. He was finally allowed by the court to visit abroad. Like the Mallya case involving default of bank loans, another such case arose from a long-standing PIL dealing with “bad loans” in which the apex court asked the Centre to give a list of “corporate entities” against whom outstanding loans were in excess of Rs 500 crore, besides the “empirical data” on recovery cases pending for last ten years in debt recovery tribunals (DRTs) and their appellate bodies. Notwithstanding the developments relating to Birla-Sahara diary, Mallya, Karti and Sahara, the year gone by would be best remembered for the top court’s attempt to wipe the tears of thousands of homebuyers who were not handed over flats by erring builders despite paying hefty amounts from their hard-earned money. Not only common citizens, even political heavyweight like union minister Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore was left with no option but to knock the doors of the court over the issue of possession of his flat booked with Parsvnath Developers’ housing project. Other real estate players like Unitech and its Managing Director Sanjay Chandra, Jaypee, Supertech and Amrapali also came under the radar of the apex court which passed thundering orders and made clear that it would protect the interest of homebuyers at any cost.