Refund orders, an 18% Supreme Court rebuke and a ₹537.5-crore FEMA contravention: how long will BPTP’s homebuyers wait for accountability?

The buyer who paid 96% and was told to pay again

Ajay Kumar had paid more than 96% of the price of his flat in BPTP Park Spacio, Sector 37D, Gurugram. He was still told to clear advance maintenance dues before the keys would be handed over.

He paid ₹1,16,545. Then he spent roughly two years before the Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority getting it back.

In July 2026 the adjudicating officer in Gurugram ruled in his favour. The builder-buyer agreement, the order found, contained no clause that let BPTP recover maintenance before possession. BPTP was told to refund the money with 11% annual interest, pay ₹1 lakh for mental agony and ₹50,000 in litigation costs.

The sum is small. That is what makes the case worth examining. A company that contests a ₹1.16 lakh refund through a full adjudication is not behaving like a company that made a billing error. And the wider record, set out below, shows the Park Spacio order sits in a long line of similar findings.

What the Park Spacio order actually says

The order was passed in complaint no. 531 of 2024, as reported by The Financial World and Constro Facilitator. Three findings matter.

• No contractual basis. The agreement did not authorise maintenance charges before possession. BPTP collected them anyway.
• Possession used as leverage. The officer held that the company was “not entitled to deny handing over of the possession” until those charges were paid. The Financial World’s report says the conduct was held to be an unfair trade practice.
• BPTP fought it. The company contested the complaint and sought its dismissal. Its defence on pre-possession maintenance was rejected.

The interest runs from the date BPTP took the money until the date it pays it back. That detail matters: the order treats the money as never having been BPTP’s to hold.

One question the order cannot answer is how many other Park Spacio allottees paid the same charge under the same pressure and never filed a complaint. Neither BPTP nor the regulator has published that number. Until someone does, a single refund of ₹1.16 lakh is all the public can see of a practice whose true scale is unknown.

Not a one-off: five orders, four forums, one direction

Park Spacio is the latest entry in a record that runs through two benches of Haryana RERA, the national consumer commission and the Supreme Court. Every order below went against a BPTP group company.

The Supreme Court: a wait of a decade, and a rate the builder set itself

The sharpest words came from the country’s highest court. In Rajnesh Sharma v. Business Park Town Planners Ltd., decided on 24 September 2025, Justices Dipankar Datta and Augustine George Masih dealt with a plot booked in 2006. Business Park Town Planners is BPTP’s former name.

Possession was due within 24 months of the sanction of service plans. No offer came until 2018. In 2011 the developer had switched the buyer to a different plot, citing a change in the layout plan.

The buyer had been charged 18% interest whenever he paid late. When the developer defaulted, the consumer commission gave him 9%. The Supreme Court found that inadequate and doubled it. The developer, it said, could not be permitted “to escape with a nominal liability for its default”.

The bench recorded that the buyer had endured a wait of a decade, with the harassment and anxiety that go with it. It ordered payment within two months. It also made clear that parity of interest is not an automatic rule, and that it was ruling on this developer’s conduct in this case.

Park 81: nine years late, then a bill for more

The Panchkula order, as summarised by the law firm that acted for the buyers, is a catalogue of what a delayed buyer can face at the finish line. The agreement was signed on 7 July 2011. Possession was due on 7 July 2014. It was offered in June 2023.

The buyers had paid about ₹35.9 lakh, roughly 95% of the cost. The offer of possession arrived with fresh demands, each of which the authority rejected:

• Extra area. BPTP’s group company billed for an increase from 1,478 to 1,536 sq ft. The occupancy certificate approved 1,251.62 sq ft.
• Club charges. ₹50,000 was demanded for a club that was not operational.
• Cost escalation. ₹1.52 lakh was demanded for cost increases during a delay the authority attributed to the builder.
• Force majeure. The company cited the pandemic and environmental bans. The authority noted the due date had passed in 2014, years before either.

The company also relied on a “full and final settlement” signed by only one of the two allottees. The authority held it was not binding.

Park Terra: the buyer defaulted, and BPTP still overreached

The Park Terra case is less flattering to the buyer, and should be reported as such. The allottee booked two units in 2012, paid ₹18.12 lakh of ₹88.77 lakh, and stopped paying because of personal financial constraints. The project was also not completed on time.

Even so, the regulator found against BPTP on two points. It rejected the company’s argument that the claim was time-barred, calling the failure to refund a continuing breach. And it refused to let BPTP keep 15% as earnest money when the law caps the deduction at 10%.

Greater Faridabad: the grievance that starts after the keys

The orders above concern what happens before a buyer gets a home. In BPTP’s colonies across Sectors 75 to 89 of Greater Faridabad, residents say the trouble begins afterwards. Their complaints are allegations. They are also consistent, repeated and reported across 2026 by the local press.

One connection for a whole block

In April 2026, residents of BPTP’s B and C blocks wrote to Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini asking for individual electricity connections under the state distribution company, DHBVN. Amar Ujala reported their case in plain terms.

• The builder holds a single-point connection and supplies the whole block through it.
• Power cuts are frequent.
• Bills, they allege, are higher than they should be and set arbitrarily.
• Thousands of families are affected, and an earlier complaint to the Chief Minister had gone unanswered.

A household without its own meter has no direct relationship with the distribution company. It cannot approach the utility as a consumer in its own right. Its electricity depends on an intermediary that is also the party it owes maintenance to.

“Pay the dues first”

That dependency is at the centre of the most serious allegation of the summer. On 12 August 2026, Amar Ujala reported that residents of several BPTP plotted colonies accused the builder of disconnecting hundreds of homes without notice.

Residents linked the cuts to a disputed demand for road-construction money. Ravinder Chaudhary, president of the F Block residents’ association, said callers to BPTP’s help desk were told to clear outstanding maintenance before power would be restored. Staff, he said, told residents the orders came from above.

Residents told the paper that the Chief Minister had directed that essential services such as power and water cannot be cut over maintenance arrears. They asked for an inquiry.

The maintenance agency denies it outright. Shyam Sundar, managing director of BPMS, told Amar Ujala that no connection had been cut and that the allegations were false. That is a direct conflict of fact between hundreds of households and the agency. No authority has yet publicly resolved it.

A summer of outages

The same newspaper carried two further reports in the weeks around it. On 23 July 2026 it reported a 16-hour power failure in a BPTP colony affecting more than 500 families. On 20 August 2026 it reported residents of BPTP Park Elite complaining of cuts despite paid bills.

On 31 May 2026, residents of the A, C, M and J blocks of BPTP District in Sector 85 marched in protest. Accounts of that protest describe failed sewer lines, water arriving once every 25 to 40 hours, and no individual electricity connections after more than a decade of occupation. Residents demanded that the township be handed to the Municipal Corporation of Faridabad.

None of this is new. A residents’ petition from 2021 lists the same failures: electricity, water, sewerage, roads and street lights, alongside what it called hefty maintenance charges. Five years on, the list has not changed.

The money trail: ₹537.5 crore in, ₹4.84 crore to close the file

While buyers litigated over lakhs, the Enforcement Directorate was examining crores.

What the ED said in August 2025

On 26 and 27 August 2025 the ED’s Gurugram office searched BPTP’s offices and the homes of chairman and managing director Kabul Chawla and whole-time director Sudhanshu Tripathi. The agency’s statement, carried by IANS, made five claims.

1. BPTP received foreign direct investment of ₹322.5 crore from CPI India I Ltd and ₹215 crore from Harbour Victoria Investment Holding Ltd, both of Mauritius, in 2007-08.
2. The investments carried “put/swap” options that guaranteed the investors a return on exit, which the rules of the time did not allow.
3. Seized documents showed the RBI had specifically directed BPTP to amend the shareholders’ agreement and remove the put option, and that BPTP did not comply.
4. Kabul Chawla was found to be the beneficial owner of multiple foreign entities, one of which had been used to acquire a costly property in New York. Those entities, the property and the source of the funds were under examination.
5. Multiple FIRs were registered against BPTP and its directors at police stations across Delhi-NCR over long non-completion of projects and diversion of funds, and these too were a subject of investigation.

Bank lockers were frozen and documents and digital evidence seized. These are the agency’s assertions, made in a press statement. They have not been tested at trial.

The New York apartment

The overseas property is not a new subject. In 2015, Outlook reported on a New York Times investigation that linked Mr Chawla to an apartment in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center. Mr Chawla denied owning it. He said he stayed there but that it belonged to a cousin. The Times cited correspondence among brokers involved in the purchase.

Ten years later, an Indian agency said on the record that it was examining a New York property and where the money for it came from. What that examination has found, if anything, has not been made public.

What the RBI did in September 2026

On 17 September 2026 the Reserve Bank of India compounded the contravention. The details, as reported by PropNewsTime from the official release:

The contravention was the issue of shares to foreign investors with a clause assuring an exit price or return. The amount involved was ₹537.5 crore. The ED had completed its investigation and filed a complaint before the adjudicating authority. BPTP and the two directors then applied to compound, and the ED gave its no-objection.

The arithmetic deserves to be stated plainly. The total payment is about 0.9% of the amount involved in the contravention. It is a compounding fee, not a recovery of the ₹537.5 crore.

Two points of law cut in opposite directions, and both belong in an honest account.

• In BPTP’s favour: FEMA is a civil statute. Compounding is a lawful settlement, not a conviction. Contraventions suspected of involving money laundering are not eligible for compounding at all, so this one was treated as eligible.
• Against complacency: the release says compounding ends proceedings only for that particular contravention. It does not say what became of the foreign entities, the New York property or the FIRs the ED said it was examining in 2025.

The public was told in August 2025 that those matters were under examination. It has not been told how they ended, or whether they have.

The CBI and the subvention probe

A second central agency is also at work, this time under the eye of the Supreme Court.

On 14 April 2026 the CBI searched 77 locations across eight states after registering 22 new cases in what it calls the builders-financial institutions nexus. PTI reported the agency’s statement that the cases concern an alleged nexus between certain builders and officials of financial institutions that led to homebuyers being cheated. The new cases took the total registered in the probe to 50.

The mechanism under scrutiny is the subvention scheme. A bank disburses a buyer’s loan directly to the builder. The builder promises to pay the instalments until possession. When the builder stops paying and the flat is not delivered, the bank turns to the buyer.

A caution on sourcing. The claim that one of those cases names BPTP rests, for this article, on reporting by Inventiva, a publication that BPTP is suing for defamation. Inventiva reports that FIR RC2192026E0001, dated 8 April 2026, names BPTP Limited, unknown directors and promoters, and unknown officials of HDFC Bank, over the Pedestal Floors project in Sector 70-A, Gurugram. It further reports that on 20 April 2026 the Supreme Court, in a petition brought by BPTP, recorded the FIR’s existence and did not quash it.

The same reports record BPTP’s answer: that the project has 180 completed units and that only two buyers had complained. This article has not independently examined the FIR or the Supreme Court order. Any publisher should do so before treating these details as established.

What is independently established is the scale and seriousness of the wider probe, and the fact that the Supreme Court has repeatedly pressed the CBI to move faster. An FIR is the start of an investigation. It is not a finding of guilt against anyone it names.

What BPTP says

A critical account that leaves out the company’s position is not journalism. BPTP’s stated positions, on the record, are these.

• On the FEMA matter. After the 2025 searches, BPTP president Rohit Mohan told Business Standard that the matter related solely to historical investments made in 2007-08 by a Citi Group entity and a JPMorgan Chase entity. He said all information sought had been provided and the company was cooperating fully. The Tribune quoted a spokesperson as confident the company’s position would be clarified.
• On the Faridabad disconnections. The maintenance agency’s managing director says no connection was cut and the allegations are false.
• On the New York apartment. Mr Chawla has denied owning it.
• On the CBI matter. As reported, BPTP told the Supreme Court the project concerned has 180 completed units and that complaints came from two buyers.
• In the regulatory cases. BPTP contested each complaint, variously pleading limitation, force majeure and its contractual rights. Those defences failed in the orders cited here. Any of them may be under appeal.

BPTP has also gone to court over critical coverage. It has sued the publisher of Inventiva and two of its journalists in the Delhi High Court, alleging that sixteen false and defamatory articles were published between July 2025 and March 2026 with the aim of extorting money. Bar and Bench reported that on 7 April 2026 the court declined an interim injunction but directed that any further reporting be fair comment and fair reporting.

That suit is live. In September 2026 the court sent a disputed phone recording for forensic examination after BPTP alleged it captured a demand for money and the journalist said it could be an AI-generated clone of his voice. The next hearing is listed for 2 November 2026. The extortion allegation is unproven. So are the criminal allegations against BPTP.

The court’s caution is a fair one, and this article is written to respect it. No court has declared BPTP or its directors guilty of fraud. The case against the company’s conduct does not need that word. It rests on what tribunals and courts have actually ordered.

Why the pattern persists

The record does not show a company that collapsed or fled. It shows something quieter and, for buyers, more wearing: a developer that keeps losing individual cases and keeps operating exactly as before. Four features of the system make that possible.

1. Every remedy is retail

Each order binds BPTP only towards the one buyer who sued. Mr Kumar got his ₹1.16 lakh back. His neighbours, if they paid the same charge, got nothing unless they filed their own complaints.

A practice found unlawful once can therefore continue against everyone who lacks the time, money or stamina to litigate. The finding travels nowhere on its own.

2. Delay costs the buyer, not the builder

The timelines in these cases speak for themselves.

Throughout those years the developer holds the money. The buyer holds a loan, a rent bill and a case number. Interest awarded at the end rarely restores that imbalance. The Supreme Court said as much when it refused to let 9% stand.

3. The penalties are too small to change behaviour

A ₹1 lakh award for mental agony is real money to a household. To a developer of BPTP’s size it is not a deterrent. Nor, on the numbers, is a compounding payment of about 0.9% of the amount involved in a foreign-exchange contravention that the ED says persisted after the RBI directed the clause be removed.

When the price of losing is lower than the price of complying, losing becomes a business decision.

4. Nobody is counting

There is no public, consolidated record of how many orders have gone against BPTP group companies, how much they have been told to refund, or how much has actually been paid. The decisions sit in separate databases: two RERA benches, the consumer commissions, the courts.

A buyer deciding whether to trust the company cannot see the whole. Nor, it seems, can any single regulator. The ED said in 2025 that multiple FIRs existed across Delhi-NCR over non-completion of projects and diversion of funds. Their number and status have never been published in one place.

The thread that ties it together

The pre-possession charge in Gurugram and the alleged disconnections in Faridabad are the same complaint at two stages of a buyer’s life. In both, the party holding something the buyer cannot do without, the keys in one case and the electricity in the other, is accused of using it to collect money that is disputed.

In Gurugram a regulator has found that this happened. In Faridabad it remains an allegation that the maintenance agency denies. That is precisely why it needs an authority to investigate it, quickly, and say which account is true.

What must happen now

Buyers have waited long enough for case-by-case justice. The agencies and regulators already seized of these matters should now act with a speed that matches the years already lost. Speed serves the company too: if an allegation is unfounded, a prompt closure is the only real vindication.

Haryana RERA should stop waiting for complaints. Having found pre-possession maintenance was collected without contractual basis at Park Spacio, it should use its investigative powers to establish how many allottees paid it, across which BPTP projects, and order refunds for all of them. It should also publish, per promoter, every order passed and whether it has been complied with.

DHBVN and the Haryana government should set a dated, public deadline for individual electricity connections in BPTP’s Greater Faridabad colonies. They should also investigate the August 2026 disconnection allegations and state plainly whether power was cut over maintenance or road dues, and on whose instruction.

The Enforcement Directorate should tell the public what became of the matters it announced in August 2025: the foreign entities, the New York property, the source of funds and the FIRs. If those inquiries are closed, it should say so. If they are open, they have now run for more than a year and should be brought to a conclusion.

The CBI should complete its subvention investigations within a fixed timetable and either file chargesheets or file closure reports. The Supreme Court has already said that homebuyers’ agony cannot be prolonged. Fifty cases that drift are fifty more groups of buyers left servicing loans for homes they do not have.

Trial courts and consumer commissions should give builder-buyer matters the priority their human cost demands. A system in which a plot booked in 2006 reaches finality in 2025 is not delivering justice. It is documenting its absence.

BPTP should answer with documents. It should publish how many buyers were charged maintenance before possession, how many adverse orders it has complied with in full, and a block-by-block date for individual electricity connections in Faridabad. A company confident of its record has nothing to lose by showing it.

The numbers in this article are small and large by turns: ₹1.16 lakh, ₹18.12 lakh, ₹39.6 lakh, ₹537.5 crore. What they share is that each had to be extracted, by a buyer or an agency, through a legal process. Homebuyers are entitled to a market in which the law is obeyed before the order, not after it.

Disclaimer

Allegations remain allegations. This article is based on orders of regulators and courts, official statements of enforcement agencies as carried by news agencies, and published news reports, all linked below. It is fair comment on matters of public interest.

No court of law has convicted BPTP Limited, Kabul Chawla, Sudhanshu Tripathi or any other director or officer of the company of any criminal offence in connection with the matters described here, as far as the public record reviewed for this article shows. Every person and entity named is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty by a competent court.

Specifically:

• An FIR, a search or an investigation by the ED, the CBI or the police is not a finding of guilt.
• The compounding of a FEMA contravention by the RBI is a civil settlement permitted by law. It is not a conviction and does not establish money laundering or any criminal offence.
• Orders of RERA authorities and consumer commissions are civil and regulatory findings in individual cases. They may be subject to appeal, review or modification, and their current status has not been verified for each case.
• Statements attributed to residents and residents’ associations are their allegations. BPTP and its maintenance agency have denied them where noted.
• The ED’s statements about foreign entities, an overseas property and FIRs are the agency’s assertions and have not been adjudicated.
• Details of the CBI FIR concerning BPTP are drawn from secondary reporting by a publication in litigation with BPTP and have not been independently verified.

BPTP Limited and the individuals named are invited to respond. Any response received will be published in full. Corrections will be made promptly if any fact stated here is shown to be inaccurate.