MUMBAI: The board of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS) has redesignated Vineet Nayyar as its executive vice-chairman and appointed CS Rajan as managing director, six months after the new board was appointed by the government under an order from the National Company Law Tribunal. Rajan, a former bureaucrat, was already on the board. It also appointed Bijay Kumar as deputy managing director.
The reshuffle could indicate the long haul it might be for the resolution process. While the board did not give specific timelines for the resolution process to be completed, a presentation showed that much of the untangling of the complicated structure is over, and an assessment of assets and liabilities is closer.
It might also mean a long wait for banks and other lenders to recover their dues. Banks have also been restrained under National Company Law Appellate Tribunal order from declaring exposure to IL&FS as non-performing assets. Public sector banks have an exposure of Rs 35,382 crore, other banks Rs 9,436 crore, foreign banks Rs 6,031 crore, and other financial institutions Rs 9,138 crore.
“When we are looking at a resolution, we are looking at a broad set of creditors, in addition to banks. I am not saying there is a particular direction, we have followed in terms of our resolution recommendation to courts, a process which is IBC-like, it is however finally for the courts to decide which way both resolution and distribution will happen,” said Uday Kotak, chairman, IL&FS.
Of the group’s outstanding debt of Rs 94,216 crore, Rs 48,470 crore is in the four holding companies IL&FS, IL&FS Financial Services, IL&FS Energy Development Company Ltd and IL&FS Transportation Networks Ltd. Around Rs 40,000 crore worth assets have already been put up for sale and some of them, for which the process has begun, are likely to happen by May. The rest may go beyond May and the process is on, said Rajan.
Liquidation process would be taken up for entities that are seen to have no recoverable value, and some of the international assets have already gone into liquidation, Rajan said. The total number of entities under the group has already come down to 302, after 45 entities have either closed down or met with closure in the normal process.