NEW DELHI: Things just don’t seem to be dying down at India’s second largest software firm. On Saturday, a few days after Infosys filed a settlement plea with SEBI regarding ex-CFO Rajiv Bansal’s severance pay, another former company Chief Financial Officer V Balakrishnan sought the discontinuance of certain board members.
“I think the continuation of certain board members like the erstwhile co-chairman (Ravi Venkatesan) and the audit committee chairman (Roopa Kudva) looks highly untenable in light of the current development of the company filing consent agreement with SEBI over Bansal’s severance payment case,” Balakrishnan said, according to PTI.
Balakrishnan also went on to say that in view of the current development it is all the more important to restructure the board and fill it with people of high integrity and stature, he added. On December 6, Infosys said it had approached SEBI with an application to settle the issues arising out of alleged disclosure lapses on the severance package paid to Bansal.
The settlement plea has already resulted in calls from people like Mohandas Pai for the board to tender apologies to co-founder N R Narayana Murthy, who had highlighted that the severance pay given to Bansal was quite high and alleged there were instance of corporate misgovernance under the previous regime.
Balakrishnan, a known Murthy supporter, also raised the issue, stating that the earlier communication by the firm to stock exchanges blaming Murthy for the board’s lapses was ‘unprecedented’. “Murthy always stood for high level of corporate governance and only acted in the interest of protecting a great institution like Infosys,” Balakrishnan said.