India

Dewan Housing Finance Ltd. plunged after the Indian shadow lender posted a quarterly loss and flagged doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern amid a funding crunch in the country’s credit market, Bloomberg News reported. The stock slumped 29% to 48.5 rupees in Mumbai to the lowest close since October 2013, after briefly crashing 33% in intraday trading. The embattled lender seen its market value erode 81% this year, compared with the 11% gain in the S&P BSE Finance Index.

Shares in one of India’s biggest home loan and property finance companies, Dewan Housing Finance Ltd (DHFL), are expected to fall sharply on Monday after the lender reported dismal results and warned about its grim financial situation, Reuters reported. DHFL reported a net loss of 22.23 billion rupees ($324.3 million) for the quarter ended March 31, in a regulatory filing late on Saturday. It also said it had defaulted on the interest payments due on two non-convertible debentures. “The share price would be impacted significantly.

Beleaguered Indian shadow lender Dewan Housing Finance Corp. posted its first quarterly loss in more than a decade, missed interest payments and cast doubt on its ability to continue as a going concern, Bloomberg News reported. DHFL posted a loss of 22.23 billion rupees ($324 million) for the quarter ended March compared with 1.34 billion in net income a year ago, it said in a stock-exchange filing. That would be its first loss in data going back to June 2008. The financier also said in a separate filing that it missed interest payments amounting to 480 million rupees due last week.

Jet Airways shut down its operations on April 17 following the refusal by its lenders to advance any funds for its operations, The News Minute reported. Subsequently, State Bank of India filed an application with the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to initiate insolvency proceedings against the airline company. News has now come in that Etihad Airways has expressed its interest in the resolution of the Jet Airways imbroglio.

India’s battle against the world’s worst bad-loan ratio is being stalled by some unforeseen parties: regulators and federal investigators, Bloomberg News reported. A spate of legal challenges mounted by the country’s markets regulator, anti-money-laundering agency and its tax department accentuate conflicts between bankruptcy law and other regulations that pre-date them. In many cases, the court battles being fought by these agencies to hang on to powers to seize and sell assets of those violating their rules are derailing a 270-day resolution deadline set by the insolvency law.

Indian tycoon Anil Ambani plans to raise about 217 billion rupees ($3.2 billion) by selling assets from roads to radio stations in a bid to cut debt…Ambani is waging a war on debt. He said on June 11 that his Reliance Group repaid 350 billion rupees in the past 14 months through asset disposals, Bloomberg News reported. But a large pile remains. The four biggest group companies still have about 939 billion rupees of debt. And that excludes Reliance Communications Ltd., Ambani’s former flagship firm, that recently slipped into insolvency.

Indian car sales fell by nearly a quarter last month — marking one of the industry’s worst slumps in more than a decade — as a credit crunch squeezes consumption across the country, the Financial Times reported. Car sales of 139,628 for June were down 24 per cent on the same period last year, according to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, extending a run of three months of declines of 20 per cent or more. Sales fell 26 per cent in May. At the heart of the pain is a liquidity squeeze whose effect has started to show up in India’s industrial and economic data.

Freightco India Ltd. moved the National Company Law Tribunal to initiate insolvency proceedings against Jain Farm Fresh Foods Ltd.—a subsidiary of debt-laden Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd.—for not paying dues, BloombergQuint reported. Jain Farm Fresh, nearly 82 percent of which is owned by Ashok Jain and family-controlled Jain Irrigation, had reported a revenue worth Rs 1,632.94 crore as of March 2018 and suffered a loss of Rs 43.53 crore, according to disclosures made in the parent’s annual report.

In a related story, Moneycontrol reported that the discourse over cross border or international insolvency framework has significantly gained traction with the turmoil at Jet Airways. Any airline having international operations will naturally have assets and businesses in multiple jurisdictions. If it goes bankrupt, then questions pertaining to the relevant country will naturally arise.

The first meeting of the committee of creditors (CoC) regarding the insolvency proceedings of Jet Airways is likely to take place early next week, sources told FE. The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) had on June 20 passed an order to initiate insolvency proceedings against the grounded airline following a plea filed by State Bank of India, The Financial Express reported. The first fortnightly report by the court-appointed interim resolution professional (RP) was submitted to NCLT on July 5.