A no-holds-barred fight for the control of the most popular television news channel in the North-East has broken out between the husband-wife duo of Matang Sinh and Manoranjana Sinh.
Each has charged the other with financial impropriety and mismanagement.
Matang Sinh is a politician from Assam and was the minister of state for parliamentary affairs in the PV Narasimha Rao government.
His wife is a journalist who, before her marriage, reported for Business Standard in the mid-1990s, and now operates out of Guwahati.
Their marital discord has blown up into a full-fledged business spat, with neither of the two averse to washing dirty linen in public.
The bone of contention is control of a closely-held company called Positiv Television Pvt Ltd which runs NETV, the top ranking news channel in the North-East, and holds the licence for five more channels as well as four FM radio stations.
The crown jewel is NETV, which reaches 6.5 million homes in the region. Direct-to-home operators Dish TV and Tata Sky pay the company around Rs 70 lakh (Rs 7 million) per annum to get the channel on their platform.
The financials of the company are not known.
Earlier this month, Manoranjana Sinh wrote to the ministries of corporate affairs and information and broadcasting, alleging that she was illegally ousted from the board of Positiv Television.
The issue came to light on October 19, when an advertisement in a Guwahati daily said that she had been removed from the directorship of the company, effective September 9.
Manoranjana Sinh dismissed the notice as inconsequential as it was put out by a vice-president who, as her subordinate, had no right to remove her.
"If a public notice was sufficient to remove someone from office then everyone would have come out with public notices every other day. I am very much the chairman and managing director of the company," she said.
In her missives, she has alleged that her husband fraudulently bloated the equity base of the company, which helped him borrow Rs 195 crore (Rs 1.95 billion)
from banks.
This, she has added, is way beyond what the company requires to give shape to its business plans.
The company's current turnover, her letters have indicated, is just about Rs 5 crore (Rs 50 million).
Sitting in his spacious office in an industrial sector of Noida, surrounded by large idols of gods, half a dozen television screens, a closed-circuit television monitor and at least three mobile handsets, Matang Sinh said that all procedures were duly followed when his wife was removed from the board.
Manoranjana Singh was removed, he added, because she was disrupting the functioning of the news channel.
At the moment, Matang Sinh owns almost 90 per cent in Positiv Television, while the rest is with his wife. The two had started the company as 50:50 partners some years back.
Matang Sinh said his wife's stake in the company was brought with the money given by him. All subsequent changes in shareholding are above board and the registrar of companies has always been kept in the loop, he added.
So far as bank credit is concerned, he said that the loans on the company's books add up to Rs 125 crore (Rs 1.25 billion) and were taken some years ago when his wife was a director on the board.
The repayment of these loans and interest thereon is on track, he added.
"If there was financial impropriety, why does she want to be reinstated as a director in the company?" he asked.
The company needs the money, Matang Sinh added, for its ambitious expansion plans.
It plans to launch three more channels in the next one month or so -- a local channel in Hyderabad, a Bhojpuri news channel and an all-women channel. Matang Sinh even has plans to tap the capital markets shortly to bankroll these plans.
NETV journalists in Guwahati and Noida said that the spat between the two had not impacted the functioning of the company.
That may be true, but the fight between the promoters is far from over.
