How a loan from a mysterious lender helped a distressed newspaper take over UNI

For years, one of India’s oldest English newspapers, The Statesman, was in financial distress. Its revenues were dwindling, and it had struggled to settle dues with lenders like the State Bank of India.

Yet, in June 2025, the newspaper pulled off a corporate miracle. Through the National Company Law Tribunal, it acquired the United News of India, or UNI, the country’s second-largest news agency.

The deal was valued at roughly Rs 75 crore. UNI’s employees, who were owed over Rs 100 crore in unpaid wages and dues, were forced to settle for just Rs 23.3 crore.

The deal raised the question: how did a newspaper company with a battered balance sheet come up with the cash to buy a news agency?

Besides being a legacy newswire, UNI also sat on lucrative real estate. It was headquartered at a property measuring half an acre in Rafi Marg in Delhi, right in the heart of the Lutyens zone. This land had been leased to it by the government and has been tied up in litigation for years.

On Friday, after the Delhi High Court lifted a stay on a 2023 government order cancelling the news agency’s lease rights to the property, the Modi government took control of the UNI office. That evening, dozens of Delhi police personnel stormed the UNI office and forced its employees out.

Scroll examined the balance sheets of The Statesman and found an anonymous Rs 32 crore-loan on its books that arrived just in time for the newspaper to secure its bid for UNI.

Questions sent to the owner of the newspaper and the news agency, Rajender Parshad Gupta, The Statesman managing director Ravindra Kumar and director Vineet Gupta, remain unanswered at the time of publication.

Rajender Parshad Gupta told Scroll over the phone, “I’m not well. I’m under medical advice.”

UNI was founded in 1959 by prominent news organisations to break the monopoly of the Press Trust of India, the country’s leading news agency. Its shareholders included Ananda Bazaar Patrika, The Hindu, Indian Express, The Statesman, The Times of India, among others.

At its peak in 1975, the agency employed 139 full-time journalists and 166 stringers – reporters paid per assignment – across 53 bureaus in India. But financial trouble began in the 2000s as television news began to outpace print news agencies and UNI subscribers – including the state-owned public broadcaster Prasar Bharati – started to unsubscribe.

In August 2022, UNI employees took the agency to the National Company Law Tribunal over years of unpaid dues. The NCLT began an insolvency process to take stock of the assets of UNI, and settle the dues of creditors by either liquidating or reviving UNI.

As part of the process, the tribunal found that the agency’s debt came to Rs 125.5 crore – Rs 104 crore due to its employees, Rs 16.5 crore to the government, Rs 2 crore to the State Bank of India and the rest to other creditors.

On the asset side, apart from the Rafi Marg property, the tribunal recorded that the agency had properties in Hyderabad, Bhopal, Indore and Bengaluru, whose leases had either been cancelled or had expired. It also owned a flat in Nashik and had tenancy rights over a property in Mumbai. The fair value of UNI’s land and buildings was pegged at Rs 54 crore. A report in The Indian Express, citing an anonymous government source, pegged the value of the land at Rafi Marg at Rs 409 crore.

Among those who showed interest in acquiring UNI were former journalist and Bharatiya Janata Party minister MJ Akbar, Gautam Adani’s brother-in-law, Rakesh Ramanlal Shah, and The Statesman, according to Newslaundry.

The Statesman is a 150-year-old newspaper, founded by journalist Robert Knight in 1875. It was owned by the British till the 1960s.

Like UNI, it faced financial decline over the years, becoming a distressed business. At the end of 2024-’25, the cash and bank balance of The Statesman Ltd, the company that owned the newspaper, stood at Rs 1 crore.

Its balance sheets show that The Statesman had not turned a profit in more than a decade.

In 2023-’24, its long-term liabilities stood at Rs 22 crore and short-term liabilities amounted to Rs 133 crore. In comparison, UNI’s long-term liabilities in the same year were Rs 6.7 crore and the short-term ones were Rs 172 crore.

In 2024-’25, The Statesman’s statutory auditors calculated an accumulated loss of Rs 47.4 crore over 15 years. “The above factors indicate a material uncertainty which may cast a significant doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” they stated in an independent audit.

The same year, however, the distressed newspaper made a bid to acquire UNI.

For this, it had to pay a performance guarantee of Rs 20 crore – a deposit that a bidder puts up to prove they are serious about a deal – to the news agency. ​​If it did not, the acquisition would collapse, and the NCLT would look for other buyers.

Ravindra Kumar, the paper’s managing director, told Newslaundry that the organisation had losses but was treating UNI as a “special project”. “And we are raising the finance for it,” he added.

The funds clearly materialised. In February 2025, the NCLT passed a verdict and handed over UNI to The Statesman, approving its Rs 75 crore takeover plan – Rs 72 crore to the creditors and a fresh capital infusion of Rs 3 crore. As per the plan, the government would receive 100% of its dues, SBI would receive 64%, and the employees only 22%.

The tribunal held that it could only verify that the plan followed the law, not whether the settlement was fair.

From being a 12% shareholder in UNI before the insolvency, The Statesman acquired 100% of the news agency in June 2025.

Where did the money come from exactly when it was needed?

On January 30, 2026, the newspaper filed its latest balance sheet that recorded its accounts till March 31, 2025.

The filing shows that the year when The Statesman managed to pay the Rs 20-crore performance guarantee to UNI was also when its long-term borrowings shot up from Rs 22.1 crore in 2023-’24 to Rs 53.9 crore 2024-’25 – an increase of Rs 31.8 crore.

The source of this loan of Rs 31.8 crore has not been disclosed by the newspaper. It is simply labelled “other loans”.

Curiously, this loan is unsecured. Unlike secured loans, where lenders demand collateral – property, machinery, or fixed deposits – an unsecured loan requires none. The auditors noted that the loan was still “subject to confirmation” and due to absence of documents, they could not determine what rate of interest, if any, was being charged.

All in all, a distressed newspaper’s guarantee of Rs 20 crore to acquire a distressed newswire came from an unsecured loan from one or more anonymous financiers.

Till 2024, The Statesman itself was mostly owned by 15 Kolkata-based trusts. These included the Soli Sorabjee Charity Trust, Nani Palkhivala Charity Trust and the Jai Prakash Narayan Charity Trust.

Though the ultimate beneficiaries of these trusts have not been disclosed, a decade-old filing by the newspaper said that all of them had The Statesman’s managing director Ravindra Kumar as a trustee.

By 2024, Rajender Parshad Gupta, a real-estate developer and stock broker, had become a co-trustee of at least two of these 15 trusts.

Taken together, in 2024, the trusts owned nearly 64% of The Statesman, while firms controlled by Gupta owned 20% of the newspaper. He also served as its chairman.

However, the shareholding pattern changed drastically in 2025. It was the culmination of a process that had started three years before.

Just three days after UNI was taken to the NCLT in August 2022, The Statesman floated seven lakh special shares worth Rs 100 each. These shares came with the special power of appointing a director to the paper’s board. The paper’s board removed a company clause that capped an individual’s shareholding at 13%.

On August 5, 2024, Gupta and his five relatives bought all 7 lakh new shares for Rs 7 crore, increasing their stake in The Statesman from 20% to 90%. These relatives include his wife Veena and nephews Rajeev, Vineet, Amit and Sandeep.

In other words, by June 2025, the Guptas came to control not one but two legacy media organisations – The Statesman and UNI.

Not much is known about the Guptas. They have a stock brokerage business since 1993 and have firms with real estate assets in Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and West Bengal.

In 2017, Rajender Parshad Gupta and The Statesman had published a book on then president Pranab Mukherjee and presented it to him in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Rashtrapati Bhawan.

The Statesman’s book-keeping over the years has come under scrutiny by its own statutory auditors.

In 2024-’25, the year that The Statesman was allowed to acquire UNI, the paper’s auditors stated that it has “no internal audit system commensurate with the size and nature of its business”. It added that it has not appointed an external chartered accountant nor an in-house team for carrying out internal audits.

The auditors said that The Statesman was not compliant with sections 185 and 186 of the Companies Act, 2013. Section 185 bars a company from lending money or providing guarantees to its own directors or their related parties. Section 186 sets limits on how much a firm can lend, invest, or give guarantees to other companies.

In the past, The Statesman has given out loans even while being deep in debt. As of 2024-’25, despite being saddled with long-term loans of Rs 53.9 crore, it advanced Rs 96 crore to other firms – a sum that is three times its annual revenue. The names of these firms have not been disclosed in its filings.

In addition, it paid Rs 20 crore to UNI’s creditors as a performance guarantee.

In 2025-’26, it paid the remaining Rs 55 crore to acquire the agency. The source of these funds is not known yet since both UNI and The Statesman will make their 2025-’26 financial filings by the end of 2026 or early 2027.

Source: Scroll
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