New York/Mumbai: Subrata Roy, the boss of Indian conglomerate Sahara, is in a New Delhi prison on contempt-of-court charges and needs to post $1.6 billion in bail to get out. To help raise the money, Sahara is in talks to refinance its overseas hotels, including New York's Plaza.

The only problem: It's unclear if the man who's orchestrating the deal, a 34-year-old former broker named Saransh Sharma, has the money to pull it off.

Sahara's head of corporate finance, Sandeep Wadhwa, said Sahara's lawyers had verified with Bank of America that Sharma has deposited just over $1 billion in an account at the bank that is ‘earmarked for the said transaction’.

Ghost account

That account, however, doesn't appear to exist. A manager at the bank told Reuters that he didn't write a crucial document attributed to him: an email, sent in his name to Sahara, which purported to verify the account's existence. After Reuters asked the bank to look into the account, spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens issued a statement saying: ‘Bank of America isn't involved in the transaction’.

What's more, Sharma, who lives in San Jose, California, has admitted to stealing a database from a former employer. There are also two pending lawsuits against him alleging he forged a letter and produced fake documents to obtain a loan.

Bank of America's assertion that it has nothing to do with the deal, as well as details about Sharma's past, could throw a wrench into Sahara's efforts to free Roy in a case that has made headlines in India for almost a year.

‘Mr. Sahara’

Roy is being held at Tihar jail, the largest in India, on contempt charges for failing to comply with a court order to repay investors in a bond scheme later ruled to be illegal. The bail amount, the largest ever in India, reflects the cost of the illegal scheme, estimated by Indian regulators to be as much as $7 billion.

A lawyer working for Sahara, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the company's lawyers had not separately checked with Bank of America to see whether Sharma had a billion-dollar account with the bank. Instead, the lawyer said, Sahara relied on a letter from the bank saying the funds were there. Sahara declined to comment on the lawyer's assertion.

Sahara's businesses range from financial services to media, retail and real estate. The company used to sponsor the Indian cricket team, which helped to make it a household name in the country. During his heyday, Roy, 66, socialized with presidents and film stars. Seen as a maverick among India's conservative business elite, his self-appointed title is ‘Managing Worker’, and he's known in the company as ‘Saharasri’, or ‘Mr. Sahara’.