Sources in the Autoriders camp expressed the suspicion to The Financial Express on conditions of anonymity that the notice may be evidence of the Mehtas' effort to ratify post-facto a quiet preferential allotment that the company had undertaken earlier, when besieged by the open offer for 20 per cent of its equity by the Autoriders group.

On that occasion, the Autoriders group had raised severe objections to the preferential issue, and provided specific grounds to Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on which such an issue could be considered invalid.

According to Autoriderssources, the notice could be evidence of the fact that the Mehtas were seeking post-facto ratification for that same preferential allotment, and that this time around, the Saurashtra Cement promoters may provide the details to shareholders that they had omitted earlier. It can be expected that the resolutions will now be presented to shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting, said sources.

The Autoriders group had made an open offer for 20 per cent of the equity of Saurashtra Cement, sparking off a desperate bid by the promoters of the latter to save their stake in the company. In the process, the company went in for a series of controversial preferential allotments of equity to the promoters, on which information was provided late to the Bombay Stock Exchange due to various reasons explained by the company later.

The Autoriders group had challenged this version of the explanation for the delay, and had questioned the lack of necessary details in the notifications provided by the company on thepreferential allotments. Meanwhile, the open offer itself had been dragged to the courts by a shareholder, and this mired the issue in further controversy.

Since then, the ball has been in the court of Sebi and the judiciary on the question of whether or not the Patels-owned Autoriders can buy out Saurashtra Cement or not.