The saga of Polaris and the estranged top management of its Business Process Outsourcing subsidiary Optimus took a new turn with a Mumbai court on Thursday issuing summons against Polaris Software Lab, its chairman and CEO Arun Jain and other directors of the company for offences relating to cheating and defamation.
The case was jointly filed by Harpal Dugal and Suren Khirwadkar, who were managing partners of Polaris' BPO subsidiary Optimus.
In his judgment delivered on June 13, Metropolitan Magistrate B A Shelar said there were sufficient grounds to proceed against all the accused for cheating and defamation.
In their complaint Dugal and Khirwadkar had pointed out that Polaris had not acted on its promise of giving them sweat equity in Optimus and Polaris and its management had cast aspersions on their professionalism by saying they were responsible for the poor performance of Optimus.
The judgment impacts Polaris Software Lab, Arun Jain and directors of the company who were on the board of the company before the complaint was filed by the duo in May. Directors of Polaris who have been summoned by the magistrate include Satya Pal, Govind Singhal, R C Bhargava, Arvind Kumar, Ajay Relan, and Abhay Aggarwal.
Neither Harpal Dugal, in Mumbai, nor Suren Khirwadkar, in the US, were available for comment.
In the last week of May, Khirwadkar, the managing partner of Optimus had resigned from its board a day before Polaris' board meeting was scheduled.
"This letter is being sent without prejudice to contentions I have raised/proposed to raise in the various legal proceedings pending/proposed to be initiated," the e-mailed resignation letter had said. It is not clear at this point of time whether Dugal also resigned from the board of Optimus.
The summons to Polaris comes against the backdrop of its ongoing arbitration against Bank Artha Graha of Indonesia in Singapore.
Arun Jain was arrested in Jakarta on a complaint by the bank and it needed the Indian government's intervention to get him released.
Dugal and Khirwadkar's joined Polaris in April 2002. Dugal is the former CEO of Standard Chartered Bank and Khirwadkar the former country marketing director of Citibank.
Dugal and Khirwadkar were brought into the company to build its BPO operations. Dugal and Khirwadkar, say insiders, were distressed they did not get equity stakes as they claim to have been promised.
They have since signed on leading lawyer Mahesh Jethmalani to fight their case.
Although they are not talking, industry sources say the equity promised was around 5 per cent each, and an additional 2 per cent if any big buyout was made.
