India

Steelmakers taking control of insolvent plants will result in greater capacity utilisation, triggering a “steep” hike in domestic demand of graphite electrodes, according to Ravi Jhunjhunwala, chairman and managing director of HEG Ltd,  BloombergQuint reported. “A lot of steel plants have changed hands recently and a lot are likely to change hands in the near future,” Jhunjhunwala told BloombergQuint.

A consortium of banks has applied to the debt recovery tribunal in Delhi seeking to enforce personal guarantees on the promoters of Videocon group, Venugopal Dhoot and his brother Rajkumar Dhoot. Videocon owes these banks Rs 20,000 crore, The Economic Times reported. An application by the State Bank of India that ET has reviewed said it was approaching the tribunal as the Dhoots did not respond to a guarantee invocation notice sent to them. The Dhoots had promised to personally repay the banks if their companies defaulted on the loans, according to the application.

India’s debt-laden Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) said on Monday it received more than a dozen expressions of interest for its stakes in subsidiaries IL&FS Securities Services, and ISSL Settlement & Transaction Services, Reuters reported. IL&FS, a major infrastructure financing and development company, earlier this month started work on plans to sell off assets, part of a wider restructuring of the group after it defaulted on some of its debt.

India’s finance industry is letting a good crisis go to waste by not learning from it. The sudden $12.8 billion bankruptcy of infrastructure lender IL&FS Group, currently sequestered under a government-blessed, out-of-court process, underscores India’s lack of preparedness to handle a big shift in lending in recent years — away from banks, a Bloomberg View reported.

For most of the past 83 years, the directors of the Reserve Bank of India went almost unnoticed as they met for regular board meetings to discuss mostly administrative affairs, the Financial Times reported. But when the 18 central board members filed in for this week’s meeting at the RBI’s Mumbai headquarters, they were the object of a media frenzy, with additional police drafted in to monitor a gaggle of cameramen jostling outside the building’s fortified entrance. For the past month, India’s central bank has been at the centre of a political storm like few others in its history.

The Supreme Court approved Binani Cement Ltd.’s sale to UltraTech Cement Ltd. today, upholding the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s verdict on the insolvency bids, BloombergQuint reported. The two-judge bench headed by Justice RF Nariman quashed Dalmia Bharat’s plea challenging the verdict, saying there was no infirmity in approval granted by the NCLAT, Bloomberg reported. The appellate tribunal had on Nov 14.

India’s central bank has given ground to government pressure and agreed to reassess its management of reserves and treatment of troubled banks, as prime minister Narendra Modi seeks to reinvigorate the economy ahead of a general election, the Financial Times reported. The moves were announced by the Reserve Bank of India following a nine-hour meeting of its board of directors, the first since differences between the RBI and the government burst into the open last month.

India’s biggest gas utility is considering acquiring all of the wind energy assets held by a subsidiary of a troubled shadow bank, according to people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg News reported. GAIL India Ltd. is looking to buy 775 megawatts of wind energy assets from IL&FS Energy Development Co., a unit of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd., and has approached investment bankers to advise on a possible deal, the people said, asking not to be named as the talks are private.

India house prices will rise at half the rate of consumer price inflation next year, hit by dwindling credit supply, according to a Reuters poll of housing market experts who said Delhi, the national capital, will be hit hardest, Reuters reported. House prices have risen at almost double-digit rates for over a decade in a country of 1.3 billion people, where for many, owning a home is still a dream. Major cities in India have become some of the most densely populated in the world.

India’s top hedge fund is exploring opportunities in state-run banks, a sector shunned by most investors till now, as valuations turn attractive and the backlog of bad loans that have riddled lenders start to dwindle, Reuters reported. State-run banks will also benefit if the economy continues to grow at about 7 percent, Andrew Holland, chief executive of Avendus Capital Public Markets Alternate Strategies LLP, said at the Reuters Global Investment 2019 Outlook Summit.