The Central government on Monday moved the top corporate tribunal to change the management of the beleaguered IL&FS.

According to sources, the matter has been listed in the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), Mumbai, for hearing later in the day.

The debt ridden IL&FS has been taken to the NCLT, Mumbai, by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, the sources told IANS here.

The development comes a day after Congress President Rahul Gandhi alleged that public money was being used to bail-out IL&FS.

In a tweet on Sunday, Gandhi alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was bailing out the IL&FS group which has a long-term debt liability of around Rs 91,000 crore via public savings in LIC and the State Bank of India (SBI).

The Congress has raised the issue and warned of “an impending ‘Lehman Brothers-type’ economic crisis facing the country”.

The party has also called for a forensic audit of the group over the disbursement of Rs 42,000 crore in the last four years.

The call for an audit comes at a time, when concerns have been raised regarding the financial stability of the group after some of its subsidiaries defaulted on commercial paper repayment obligations.

On Saturday, the cash-strapped company said it was planning to have a “successful” rights issue and would sell its assets to repay creditors.

The company in its Annual General Meeting sought shareholders’ permission to carry out its plans to recapitalise itself.

Recently, IL&FS Financial Services, a group company, defaulted in payment obligations of bank loans (including interest), term and short-term deposits and failed to meet the commercial paper (CP) redemption obligations due on September 14.

On September 15, the company reported that it had received notices for delays and defaults in servicing some of the inter corporate deposits accepted by it.

Consequent to defaults, rating agency ICRA downgraded the ratings of its short-term and long-term borrowing programmes.

IL&FS Ltd is a core investment company and serves as the holding company of the IL&FS Group, with most business operations domiciled in separate companies which form an ecosystem of expertise across infrastructure, finance and social and environmental services.

Initially promoted by the Central Bank of India, Housing Development Finance Corporation Ltd and the Unit Trust of India, IL&FS was incorporated in 1987.

Over the years, it has inducted institutional shareholders including SBI, LIC, ORIX Corporation of Japan and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).

As on March 31, 2018, LIC and ORIX Corporation are the largest shareholders in IL&FS with their stakeholding at 25.34 per cent and 23.54 per cent, respectively. Other prominent shareholders include ADIA (12.56 per cent), HDFC (9.02 per cent), CBI (7.67 per cent) and SBI (6.42 per cent).

IANS

Despite reduced tax rates on several items, revenue collection under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) stood at Rs 94,442 crore in September after sliding to Rs 93,960 crore in August.

“The revenue collected in September shows an upward trend as compared to the August collection,” the Finance Ministry said.

The government had last month attributed the dip in tax revenues to “probable postponement” of sale of over 50 items, including refrigerators, washing machines and small televisions, on which tax rate was reduced by the GST Council at its July 21 meeting. The reduced rates were to come into effect from July 27.

“The actual impact of reduction of rate of taxes would be observed only from next month (September),” the Finance Ministry had then said.

Of the total gross revenue collected in September (for August), Rs 15,318 crore was collected as Central-GST (CGST), Rs 21,061 crore as state-GST (SGST) and Rs 50,070 crore as integrated-GST (IGST).

An additional Rs 7,993 crore was collected as cess, an official statement said.

“The total number of GSTR-3B returns filed for August up to September 30 was 67 lakh,” it said.

“The total revenue earned by Central government and the state governments after settlement is Rs 30,574 crore for CGST and Rs 35,015 crore for the SGST.”

The key Indian equity indices opened on a negative note on Monday amidst mixed cues from the Asian markets.

Heavy selling pressure was witnessed in banking, auto and financial stocks, analysts said.

At 9.26 a.m., the wider Nifty50 on the National Stock Exchange traded 10,885.45 points, lower 45 points or 0.41 per cent from its previous close.

The S&P BSE Sensex, which had opened at 36,274.25 points, traded at 36,186.10 points, down 41.04 points or 0.11 per cent from its previous close of 36,227.14 points.

So far, it has touched an intra-day high of 36,291.51 points and a low 36,083 points.

IANS

Fifty eight million people in India are living without pension or any other form of assistance, civil society organisation Pension Parishad has said.

Citing the State of Pensions in India Report 2018, Economist Prabhat Patnaik said the Central government spends as little as 0.04 per cent of the GDP for its flagship Indira Gandhi National Social Assistance (IGNOAPS) programme for ensuring income security for the elderly.

“It will cost only about 1.6 per cent of the present-day GDP to ensure 90 per cent of the elderly population a pension of Rs 2,500 per person every month,” Patnaik said.

According to National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), a welfare programme administered by the Ministry of Rural Development, 80 million elderly people in India are entitled to a pension of Rs 200 per month.

This meagre amount reaches only about 22.3 million people, Pension Parishad Coordinator, Nikhil Dey said.

The organisation also pointed out that countries like Nepal, Bolivia, Lesotho, Bostwana, Ecuador — all much smaller economies as compared to India — ensure better social pensions for their elderly citizens.

(IANS)

In the biggest-ever security breach after Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook on Friday admitted hackers broke into nearly 50 million users’ accounts by stealing their “access tokens” or digital keys.

This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts, Facebook said in a statement.

Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they do not need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.

“Our investigation is still in its early stages. But it’s clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted ‘View As’, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else,” said Guy Rosen, VP of Product Management.

Facebook security team discovered the security issue on September 25, and it has now fixed the vulnerability and informed the law enforcement.

“We have reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts we know were affected to protect their security.

“We’re also taking the precautionary step of resetting access tokens for another 40 million accounts that have been subject to a ‘View As’ look-up in the last year,” Facebook said.

As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back into Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook login.

After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened.

“We’re temporarily turning off the ‘View As’ feature while we conduct a thorough security review,” Facebook said.

This attack exploited the complex interaction of multiple issues in Facebook code.

“The attackers not only needed to find this vulnerability and use it to get an access token, they then had to pivot from that account to others to steal more tokens,” it said.

Facebook said it does not know who is behind this massive security attack.

“We’re working hard to better understand these details and “we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change,” said the company.

In the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data of nearly 87 million people was breached upon.

IANS

Expressing satisfaction with GST collection trends, the government on Friday said the states were on the path of meeting their revenue targets by themselves, thereby not needing compensation from the Centre after the five-year period of its implementation.

After a GST Council meeting here, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the emerging trend in every state showed that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) collection was better this year (till August) compared to the last year.

He said the deficit in revenue collection targets of states under the GST came down to 13 per cent till August this year compared to 16 per cent last year, which may come down further by one to two per cent by end of the year considering the high consumption.

“We have to neutralize the state deficit to zero by the expiry of the five-year period (of GST implementation)… Closer it gets to zero, states would get closer to achieving their revenue targets themselves,” he told reporters.

The revenue targets of states are calculated by adding a 14 per cent annual increment to their 2015-16 indirect tax collections.

Jaitley said that despite adding three increments for 14 per cent, the North East states had no revenue shortfall which was a “first sign of encouragement”.

He said out of the six states which had shortfall in collection, Finance Secretary Hasmukh Adhia visited five and gave detailed reports indicating the “reasons and special circumstances” for such shortfall.

He said one common thread was existence of some form of special taxation in some of those states in 2015-16, which inflated the collection in that year compared to the previous year.

“Like in Bihar, 2015-16 was the year of prohibition and hence the state imposed an additional VAT which inflated VAT collections of that year by 27 per cent over 2014-15. Bihar benefited from that aberration since that became the base on which it gets 14 per cent increment each year,” he said.

However, he said, the big picture that was emerging showed that in each state, the revenue collection was better in the second year (till August) of GST compared with the first year.

(IANS)

The Delhi High Court on Friday rejected a plea challenging the ordinance which prescribes up to three years’ jail and or fine for a man who divorces his wife through Triple Talaq or instant divorce.

A bench of Chief Justice of Delhi High Court Rajendra Menon and Justice V. Kameswar Rao said that Triple Talaq has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and now it was upto the government to decide the issue.

The court was hearing a plea filed by advocate Shahid Azad.

“The ordinance is arbitrary and unnecessary bringing a draconian, illogical, unreasonable and vague legislation through the route of ordinance shows a lack of respect for parliament and the people whose faith lies in India’s secular constitution,” the plea said.

The advocate said that the ordinance is a coloured legislation which does not achieve its objects rather it is a remedy which is in itself a disease and creates more confusion.

The Union Cabinet cleared the ordinance last week and it was promulgated by the President.

IANS

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is expected to hike its key lending rate by 25 basis points in October, a SBI Ecowrap report said on Thursday.

According to the report, the expected rate hike might not be the last one in the current fiscal.

In August, the RBI had hiked its key lending rate by 25 basis points to bring the repo to 6.50 per cent citing upside risks to inflation.

IANS

The key Indian equity indices traded on a negative note during the afternoon session on Thursday, reversing all the initial gains, with the NSE Nifty50 falling below the psychological level of 11,000 points.

Investors turned cautious ahead of the September futures and options (F&O) contracts expiry.

The indices, however, opened in the green as the rupee appreciated earlier after the government raised the import duty on 19 non-essential items on Wednesday in order to arrest its fall and to curb the widening current account deficit.

Almost all the sectors were under selling pressure led by finance, banking and healthcare stocks. However, IT stocks gained due to a weakening rupee. At 1.34 p.m., rupee traded around 72.72 per US dollar, against the previous close of 72.61.

Index-wise, the NSE Nifty50 traded at 10,965.45 points (1.34 p.m.), lower by 88.35 points or 0.80 per cent from the previous close.

The BSE Sensex, which had opened at 36,691.93 points, traded at 36,308.70 points, down 233.57 points or 0.64 per cent from the previous close of 36,542.27 points.

So far, it has touched an intra-day high of 36,711.62 points and a low of 36,255.73.

(IANS)

With the idea of filling the government exchequer, which is hit by the farm loan waiver scheme, the state government decided to issue permissions to 1,000 new liquor shops across the state. These new liquor shops will come up according to the population density.

According to a circular issued by the commissioner of Excise department, department officers are instructed to carry out a survey across the state to identify villages/ towns/ wards where the new liquor shops can be permitted. Based on the demand and the population density, officials are asked to send proposals to the state government.

“The state exchequer is virtually empty now following the implementation of the farm loan waiver scheme. Now the state government is planning to fill the exchequer by all means. One of the ways of increasing revenue is to increase the number of liquor shops,” said an officer from the excise department who is privy to the developments.

PTI