- Shirpur Gold Refinery was once India’s largest gold and silver refiner by installed capacity, built to turn raw gold dore and scrap into 99.99% pure bullion, bars, coins and jewellery under the ‘Zee Gold’ brand. A member of the Essel group, the company operated from a single plant in Shirpur, Maharashtra, and later extended its reach through a Dubai trading subsidiary - but its manufacturing engine has been idle since February 2022, starved of working capital and caught in lender recovery proceedings. The recurring approach was to combine accredited in-house refining with a branded product range and a global sourcing-and-distribution network, a model that has now unravelled into insolvency.
Business segments
A single refining-and-manufacturing engine, now suspended, that once fed a Dubai trading arm - both currently in insolvency proceedings.
1. Gold and silver refining: the plant that stopped
The Shirpur refinery could turn raw gold dore into 99.99% pure bullion, bars, coins and jewellery at what was claimed to be India’s largest installed capacity - but no furnace has run since early 2020.
- India’s biggest refining capacity - the plant was built to refine gold and silver from the raw dore stage all the way to 99.99% purity, with a technical capability of reaching 999.9 parts per thousand fineness for both metals, which positioned its output to match the highest internationally accepted standards.
- An accredited in-house lab - the company’s laboratory held NABL accreditation for ISO/IEC 17025:2005 in chemical analysis, covering fire assay, chemical assay and instrument assay for gold and silver, so every batch could be tested to a government-recognised benchmark without relying on outside facilities.
- Branded products from bars to jewellery - refined metal was cast into gold bars of 100 grams and 1 kilogram, minted into gold and silver coins of various denominations, and fabricated into jewellery designs, all sold under the ‘Zee Gold’ name, which meant the company was not just a commodity processor but a branded manufacturer reaching domestic consumers.
- Global raw-material ties, local sales - the company had tied up with global miners for a continuous supply of gold dore and was negotiating off-take agreements, while also buying SR bars and scrap from local markets; its customer base, however, was largely domestic, served through a distribution network built over years across India’s gold-consuming centres.
- Hedged against price swings - because gold prices move with the London, New York and Tokyo exchanges and local rates are an algorithm of those spot prices plus the rupee, the company set up a dealing room with hedging policies to manage both commodity-price and foreign-exchange risk, protecting the margin between raw-material cost and finished-product sale.
- Frozen since February 2022 - manufacturing stopped because of a paucity of funds, a notice from lenders taking constructive possession of the factory premises, and the freezing of bank credit lines; as of March 2023 the company had no permanent employees and no business activity, and the plant itself had been put on the block by a lender bank.
2. Dubai bullion trading: the subsidiary that carried the turnover
A wholly owned Dubai subsidiary sourced and sold physical gold and silver across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas - until it too ran out of working capital and filed for liquidation.
- A global trading hub - Shirpur Gold DMCC (originally Zee Gold DMCC) was set up in Dubai to tap wholesale physical bullion trading opportunities, using the emirate’s central time zone to trade with markets from the Americas to the former CIS countries, and building a customer base with channel partners in the UAE and Hong Kong.
- Full product range, not just raw metal - the subsidiary sold the company’s entire line of physical gold and silver products, including value-added investment bars and coins, which meant it acted as the international storefront for the Shirpur refinery’s output rather than a separate commodity desk.
- Starved of working capital - commercial operations ceased because the subsidiary could not secure the working capital it needed, and on 29 May 2024 it formally closed its business activities; by that point it had contributed the entirety of the listed entity’s turnover in its last financial year, even as the consolidated balance-sheet net worth had turned negative.
- Now in liquidation - on 5 September 2024 the subsidiary filed for bankruptcy and liquidation before the Dubai Bankruptcy Court, having obtained approval from Shirpur Gold Refinery as its 100% owner, because it could no longer pay its debts.
Group structure and partners
Shirpur Gold Refinery sits inside the Essel group with a now-defunct Dubai subsidiary, two inactive step-down mining ventures, and lender claims that have pushed the parent into India’s insolvency process.
- The company is part of the Essel group and had one wholly owned material subsidiary, Shirpur Gold DMCC in Dubai, which closed in May 2024 and entered liquidation in September 2024.
- Through the Dubai subsidiary it held two step-down entities: Precious Metals Mining and Refinery Limited in Papua New Guinea, which had a trial run but was struck off the register in November 2023, and Metallic Exploration and Mining in Mali, which never started operations.
- Three lender banks and one financial institution had outstanding dues classified as non-performing assets, and the factory premises at Shirpur were under constructive possession by a lender that put the plant on the block.
- A petition under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code was admitted by the NCLT Mumbai on 24 June 2024, after Prudent ARC Ltd. stepped in as the financial creditor claiming dues of roughly Rs.92 crore, with the date of default recorded as 31 December 2019.
- Almost all of the company’s trade debtors were found to be connected to the company or its promoter family, and those connected entities had themselves initiated insolvency proceedings against the major debtors.