HC refuses to entertain plea on Sahara Shahar land lease

The Allahabad High Court has refused to entertain a plea by Sahara India Commercial Corporation Limited against the Lucknow Municipal Corporations orders of September 2025 cancelling the land lease of its Sahara Shahar complex and directing that the land be vacated.

The Allahabad High Court has refused to entertain a plea by Sahara India Commercial Corporation Limited against the Lucknow Municipal Corporation's orders of September 2025 cancelling the land lease of its Sahara Shahar complex and directing that the land be vacated. The HC's Lucknow bench said the plea is not maintainable as a matter related to Sahara Shahr is already before the apex court, where Sahara has submitted an application and the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) too has also filed an objection. ''We find our hands tied in proceeding any further in the matter,'' a bench of Justices Rajan Roy and Manjive Shukla said as it passed the order on April 22, dismissing the petition filed by M/s Sahara India Commercial Corporation Limited. The petitioner had challenged a Lucknow Municipal Corporation order of September 8, 2025, cancelling the land lease granted to Sahara on October 22, 1994, and a further order of September 11, 2025, ordering the land to be vacated. The petitioner submitted that an arbitration order had been passed in its favour regarding this land on September 2, 2017, but the LMC had ignored that order and wrongly cancelled the lease, even though the company was willing to deposit the necessary money to extend the lease. The LMC opposed the petition. In the course of hearing the petition, the bench found that contempt petitions are pending in the Supreme Court against the Sahara Group regarding the order passed in the Sahara SEBI dispute. In this matter, Sahara filed an application before the Supreme Court on September 14, 2025, seeking permission to hand over several properties to the Adani Group so that the remaining compliance with the Supreme Court order could be completed by depositing the funds to be received in the Sahara SEBI account out of this transaction with the Adani Group. The bench also found that Sahara Sahar was among the properties listed by Sahara for handover to the Adani Group. The bench found that Sahara's petition is currently being heard in the Supreme Court and interim orders have been issued on several dates, and, hence, said there was no occasion to entertain the present plea separately.