India

The government is mulling a special window for resolution of stressed non-banking finance companies under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, a senior government official said, Mint reported. A special window, is certainly something which is being examined closely, the official said. The move also comes against the backdrop of financial sector players like Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd (DHFL) facing troubles. Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank is also grappling with financial woes.

India’s financial crisis has hit ordinary people hard. School teachers and electrical engineers have seen their pension savings get stuck in bonds of defaulted institutions, a Bloomberg View reported. More than a million depositors of a cooperative bank can’t access their cash. Homeowners have spent billions of dollars on apartments that will never be finished. Yet for workers in rich nations, the blowup in India’s shadow-banking and real-estate industries is an opportunity. Will they profit from it or get burned like their Indian counterparts?

The fear that at Dewan Housing Finance Corporation (DHFL) may spill over to other non-banking finance companies (NBFC) has pushed the government to introduce fresh rules and regulations to bring even the financial sector under the purview the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), The Economic Times reported. A government source said that Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) has finalized new rules under Section 227 of IBC that would be notified soon after all the concerns of market regulator SEBI and financial sector regulator RBI are addressed.

In a jolt to the Jaypee Group, the Supreme Court on Wednesday directed completion of the corporate insolvency resolution process for Jaypee Infratech Ltd (JIL) within 90 days and said the revised resolution plans will be invited only from the NBCC and Suraksha Realty, The Economic Times reported. The apex court said the pendency of any other application before the NCLT or NCLAT, including any interim direction, shall be no impediment for the IRP to receive and process the revised resolution plans from the two bidders.

Online sales platform Flipkart has got a stay order on insolvency proceedings initiated against it at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), in a case involving alleged withholding of dues to a seller, Business Standard reported. CloudWalker Streaming, a Mumbai-based supplier of LED TVs, alleged Flipkart did not honour a purchase agreement and had not paid dues totalling Rs 26.95 crore. It petitioned the NCLT bench here that the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) be invoked.

Some vendors of BSNL and MTNL are mulling to move insolvency pleas against the state-run firms for non-payment of dues, estimated to be around Rs 20,000 crore, a senior industry body executive said on Monday, The Economic Times reported. The pending payments are against the supply of telecom gear and other goods to BSNL and MTNL as well as Rs 45,000-crore rural broadband project BharatNet, PHD Chamber of Commerce Telecom Committee chairman Sandeep Aggarwal told PTI. "The total pending payment of BSNL and MTNL vendors is around Rs 20,000 crore.

The finance industry is in turmoil. Tax collections have hit stall speed. India’s credit and fiscal crises are joined at the hip. Consider the $13 billion in past fees that the government is asking from telecom operators, a Bloomberg View reported. It’s a desperate attempt to squeeze money from an industry in which most players have already vanished or gone bankrupt. The two old firms that are still standing amid intense price competition from newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. will bear the brunt of the recently court-approved demand. Among them, Vodafone Idea Ltd.

When Arun Sarin, Vodafone Group Plc’s India-born former CEO, was charting the British telecommunications firm’s expansion into emerging markets in the mid-2000s, his home country with more than a billion potential phone users seemed a compelling choice. Sarin wasn’t alone. Norway’s Telenor ASA, Russia’s Mobile TeleSystems PJSC and Malaysia’s Maxis Bhd were also among a slew of companies that flocked to this fast-growing market, Bloomberg News reported. The carriers banded with local partners, bid for airwaves and licenses, spending billions of dollars to prepare their networks.

The government in India has pumped $37 billion into ailing banks in the past three years. Lenders have been forced into mergers, and the central bank has wrested more than a dozen companies from the control of tycoons who defaulted on their debt, Bloomberg News reported. But cleaning up the financial system has been like playing whack-a-mole. India’s banks still sit on the biggest pile of bad loans, relative to total loans, among the major economies. They’re about 9% of debts.

At the turn of the millennium, a group of entrepreneurs in their twenties banded together in a cramped office near a New Delhi bus terminal to start what they hoped would be India’s answer to Charles Schwab, the Financial Times reported. Almost two decades later, founder Sameer Gehlaut — the son of a politician and army officer, once dubbed India’s youngest billionaire — and longtime executive Gagan Banga have more than achieved their dream, turning their company Indiabulls into one of the country’s most prominent financial groups.