Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Here’s a riddle: Your product is good and rare, there is no competition and your sales figures are good. So how do you get your shares to crash
And how do you get your company to a state that it is groaning like a banyan tree about to fall?
For the answer, try calling up Hiten Khatau of Cable Corporation of India (CCI).
| Jairaman Iyer was a telecommunications inspector with the Railways. Over the years and on the job, CCI cables became synonymous with reliability. When retirement came in 1999, he (69) along with six colleagues invested Rs 10,000 in one-year (12.5 interest rate) fixed deposits. ‘‘They have always been supplying material to the Railways so I thought they would never go down,’’ says Iyer. Twelve cheques for Rs 62 each is all that he has got from his investment. When the sum matured, what came from the company was silence and 12 cheques of Rs 62 each. Now he spends Rs 40 to travel from Dadar to the Borivali office regularly. He got a cheque on March 22 this year for Rs 2000. ‘‘Hope this one doesn’t bounce.’’ |
|
|
See also: In the footsteps of long-dead Corona
|
The Khatau scion blames it on the poor power sector scenario in the late 1990s. For the real answer make a trip to his plant at Borivali, a far-off Mumbai suburb. Jairaman Iyer (69) — and 17,999 others like him — who put their life savings in fixed deposit scheme regularly turn up at the office to get their Rs 19 crore back.
Outside, 510 workers cry hoarse against the recent spurt in ‘‘management-actions’’ like retrenchment, suspension, late salary payment, provident fund fraud and LIC fund fraud.
These are the same workers who collected a bonus of Rs 12,500 per head in the nineties. Today, they fear retrenchment. The tension is apparent. The public issues floated in the 1990s that raised Rs 86.27 crore are kaput.
That gave Hiten Khatau, the chief executive of CCI, all the time in the world to make trips to the US, sell off the company’s assets one by one and not bother about submitting balance sheets to SEBI.The Rs 600-crore plant annually churns out 6.4 lakh metres of high-tech, ISO 9001-certified cables. They also make 36,000 metres of rubber, paper, PVC and extra high-voltage cables.
‘‘The power cable industry witnessed negative growth in these years. The orders didn’t come as expected. In the last four years itself there has been no orders for 220 KV cables — our niche product,’’ says Khatau.
| PREVIOUSLY | |
|
» Strong brew of lost clients, laced with fudged accounts |
