Sandeep Singh

Funds from commercial paper, debt market at unviable rates; NHB steps up its refinance facility by Rs 6,000 crore

Five independent directors on the erstwhile board have written to the newly appointed chairman Uday Kotak on October 2 raising several red flags and elaborating on constraints of long-term finance that plague the infrastructure sector.

Vipin Sondhi, MD and CEO of JCB India said that while private investment has stayed away despite public spending, the IL&FS issue can potentially delay it further.

Between August 2014 and August 2018, the investment by mutual funds in CPs and CDs jumped over 2.5 times from an aggregate of Rs 98,738 crore in August 2014 to Rs 2,48,598 crore in August 2018.

A top executive at a leading mobile company said that while the industry was studying the Supreme Court verdict, companies are preparing to revert to physical KYC methods using paper forms and photocopies of documents.

The panic in the fixed income market due to the IL&FS default has led to a liquidity freeze, and fund managers say it is putting pressure on the equity markets too, especially on HFC and NBFC stocks.

The list includes General Insurance Corporation, LIC, SBI Employees Pension Fund, Postal Life Insurance Fund, NPS Trust, Oriental Insurance Company and United India Insurance among others.

While an equity investor may save up to 80-90 basis points in annual charges on their investment corpus, the distributors say that they are clueless about their remuneration from mutual fund advisory or sale.

Data from the Association of Mutual Funds of India show that the AUM of the MF industry jumped from Rs 9.45 lakh crore in May 2014 to Rs 25.2 lakh crore in August 2018.

The domestic mutual fund industry’s investment into these 45 companies shows that the funds increased their holding only in three between 2010 and 2018

LIC is sitting on a big loss as share price fell from 73.15 in March 2017 to Rs 37.65 in September 2017. The share price of the company closed at Rs 21.1 on September 18. The company announced zero revenue in the year ended March 2018 and a profit of Rs 19 lakh.

Less than four months before the defaults, IL&FS issued four series of non-convertible debentures and raised an aggregate of Rs 735 crore through them.

While the banks missed out on stopping Vijay Mallya from leaving the country, the SBI-led consortium of 17 banks finally filed a petition in the Supreme Court on March 5.

In a move arising out of case involving the newspaper, Income Tax department reopens Sonia and Rahul tax assessments for 2011-12. What is the National Herald case, how did it lead to the I-T move?

It is not just rising prices and imports of crude that have put pressure on the rupee. From coal & coke to electronics and minerals, a look at how Indian imports have risen sharply from one fiscal to the next.

The increase in coal shipments comes alongside a 44 per cent jump in the value of precious and semi-precious stones imports, and a 47 per cent jump in imports of metal and mineral ores.

Fuel prices jump as rupee hits another low, driven by rise in global crude prices and political uncertainty. How do these factors impact the national economy, what are India’s options for addressing the situation?

If good monsoons have propped up agriculture growth and demand in the rural economy, the government expenditure on account salary revisions by states gave impetus to the consumption story.

With mutual fund assets concentrated among top fund houses, SEBI expresses concern while insiders attribute it to good performance; other sectors show trend is not limited to mutual fund industry