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Top Tory donor’s failed property firm left hundreds out of pocket in India
By:   []
Date: None

Sam Singh has friends in high places. The Indian-born businessman has bragged about Boris Johnson staying at his Bedfordshire mansion and has personally donated at least £310,000 to the Conservative Party in less than a decade.

Singh has also been a trustee of an elephant charity headed by Prince Charles and went into business with Charles’s nephew, Ben Elliot, the Conservative co-chair currently embroiled in a ‘cash for access’ scandal involving Prince Charles and another leading Conservative funder.

But there is another, less glamorous, side to the Sam Singh story. In India, hundreds blame the company he founded for losing their life savings, after the online estate agency he built collapsed, prompting accusations of fraud, an openDemocracy investigation has found.

“They have closed and they have taken my hard-earned money,” says ‘Dinesh’, an elderly Indian retiree who lives near New Delhi, who asked that his real name not be used.

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Like many others, Dinesh accuses India Homes of failing to honour a cashback discount agreement on his property purchase, short-changing him of thousands of pounds.

“I’m a senior citizen. I’m 75-plus," he says. "I need this money.”

Singh founded India Homes’s parent company in 2007, and was a director until March 2016, when he resigned weeks before the collapse, leaving his father as sole director. On his LinkedIn profile, Singh said he “stepped down from the company at the height of its success.”

Despite his old age, Dinesh says he has made seven visits to India Homes’s head office on the outskirts of Delhi and has made a police complaint, alleging he bought a home from the company with the promise of a significant discount redeemable after purchase.

Dinesh says the money never arrived – and he’s not the only one. India’s National Consumer Complaint forum displays a long list of near-identical allegations against the company. Someone has even set up a website dedicated to it.

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