Nasheman News : In a significant development, the CBI on Thursday lodged an FIR against former ICICI Bank chief Chanda Kochhar, her husband Deepak Kochhar and industrialist V.N. Dhoot besides four companies, and raided four locations in Maharashtra in connection with a Rs 3,250-crore loan involving the Videocon Group and the ICICI Bank, informed sources said here.

The raids were conducted after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered an FIR on Tuesday naming former ICICI Bank MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar, her husband and NuPower Renewables Pvt Ltd MD Deepak Kochhar, and Videocon Group MD Dhoot, and others in the case dating back to 2009-2012.

Interestingly, Chanda Kochhar’s role in the alleged irregularities committed has been highlighted in the CBI’s FIR ever since she assumed charge as the ICICI Bank MD and CEO on May 1, 2009.

Besides, four companies have also been named in the CBI FIR: NuPower Renewables Pvt Ltd (NRL), Supreme Energy Pvt Ltd (SEPL), Videocon International Electronics Ltd (VIEL) and Videocon Industries Ltd (VIL).

According to the FIR, they have been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and Prevention of Corruption Act as the accused allegedly “sanctioned loans to private companies in a criminal conspiracy with other accused to cheat ICICI Bank”.

The FIR comes in the wake of a preliminary enquiry (PE) instituted on March 31, 2018, against Deepak Kochhar, Videocon Group officials and others to determine whether any wrongdoing was involved in the sanctioning of loan by the ICICI Bank as part of a consortium, a senior CBI official said.

The raids were carried out simultaneously at the offices of the four companies in south Mumbai and one location belonging to Videocon in Aurangabad.

The Bureau initiated the PE after news reports raised questions about Videocon’s Dhoot allegedly providing crores to a firm promoted by Deepak Kochhar and a few relatives six months after the former’s Group received the Rs 3,250-crore loan.

The CBI probe said that a complaint was received regarding the Rs 3,250-crore loan to five of Dhoot’s companies by the ICICI Bank violating banking norms and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines.

As part of a quid pro quo, Dhoot invested Rs 64 crore in NRL and SEPL and also transferred SEPL to Deepak Kochhar’s Pinnacle Energy Trust through a circuitous route between 2010 and 2012.

Between June 2009 and October 2011, the ICICI Bank also sanctioned six high-value loans to different Videocon Group companies and on August 28, 2009, Rs 300 crore was sanctioned to VIEL in contravention of various rules, with Chanda Kochhar being part of the loan sanctioning committee.

She has been charged with criminal conspiracy to cheat the ICICI Bank, abusing her position. The loan was disbursed to VIEL on September 7.

The very next day, on September 8, 2009, through SEPL, VIEL transferred Rs 64 crore to Deepak Kochhar’s NRL by which it (NRL) acquired its first power plant.

“Thus, Chanda Kochhar got illegal gratification through her husband from VIL and Dhoot, for sanctioning Rs 300 crore to VIEL,” the CBI complaint said.

The CBI has also detailed the manipulations how the NRL and SEPL’s control was handed over to Deepak Kochhar, where the subsequent alleged frauds were committed.

In violation of several norms, the ICICI Bank also sanctioned various loans to Videocon Group companies which was utilised by them to repay their unsecured loans taken from VIL, while VIL took a loan to refinance its existing loans.

The loan sanction committees had ICICI Bank’s senior officials like Sandeep Bakshi, K. Ramkumar, Sonjoy Chatterjee, N.S. Kannan, Zarin Daruwala, Rajiv Sabharwal, K.V. Kamath and Homi Khusrokhan.

“These loans have turned NPAs resulting in wrongful losses to the ICICI Bank, and wrongful gains to the borrower/ accused persons. The role of these senior officials of the sanctioning committees may also be investigated,” said the CBI FIR.

It added that the ICICI Bank had released the security of Rs 50 crore in the form of FDR available for two of the borrowing (Dhoot) companies “without any justification”.

After Chanda Kochhar took charge at the bank’s helm, the credit limits and loans were sanctioned to Videocon Group companies, with her as part of the sanctioning committees.

Following the controversy over the alleged “conflict of interests” and “non-disclosure” in the loans sanctioned by the ICICI Bank, Chanda Kochhar, 56, quit her post seeking premature retirement on October 4, 2018.

Nasheman News : The government along with the RBI are soon expected to work out some relaxations in the central bank’s Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) framework for banks struggling with huge accumulated non-performing assets (NPAs or bad loans), a senior official said on Monday.

Currently, 11 banks with high bad debts are under the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) PCA framework that prohibits them from further lending and the official said that the relaxation will be available only to those lenders that have shown substantial improvement in dealing with bad loans. 

With the aid of the relaxations, some of the banks with improved performance may be able to exit the PCA framework as early as next month, he added. 

The official pointed to the recapitalisation undertaken last month of state-run banks, ten of whom are under the PCA framework and said some banks have shown improvement both on recoveries as well as on de-risking their portfolios. 

The government last month obtained parliamentary sanction for issuing additional recapitalisation bonds of Rs 41,000 crore.

Tabling the supplementary demand for grants in this regard in the Lok Sabha last month, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the government will infuse Rs 83,000 crore in public sector banks (PSBs) in the remaining part of the fiscal taking the total recapitalisation of banks during the year to Rs 1.06 lakh crore.

Following this, Jaitley had told reporters here that he expected a few PSBs to exit the PCA framework. 

“Providing capital to better performing PCA banks to achieve 9 per cent capital to risk weighted asset ratio; 1.875 per cent Capital Conservation Buffer and the six per cent net NPA threshold, facilitating them to come out of PCA,” Jaitley said. 

Financial Services Secretary Rajeev Kumar told reporters here last month that the capital infusion will help at least four banks meet their regulatory capital norms. 

“We have made provisions to give capital to 4-5 banks depending on performance and on the Q2 and Q3 results. The figures will be decided later but there are chances that we equip at least 3 to 5 banks to meet the norms,” he said.

“The NPAs recognition is complete, recapitalisation is in full swing, it has been enhanced further, recovery is also in full swing, the last H1 (April-September 2018) recovery is to the tune of Rs 60,726 crore,” he had added.

Addressing an investors roundtable at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit in Gandhinagar last week, new RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said that after reaching a peak of 11.5 per cent in March 2018, the gross NPAs ratio of Banks improved to 10.8 per cent in September 2018. 

“As per the current assessment of the Reserve Bank, the ratio may further improve to 10.3 per cent by March 2019,” he added.

Nasheman News : Amid reports of en masse issue of prosecution notices to small companies, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on Monday clarified that there had been no mass harassment by the Income Tax Department as it had filed only 1,400 prosecutions during the current fiscal for various offences under the Income Tax Act.

It said the Mumbai Income Tax TDS (Tax Deduction at Source) office had issued prosecution show-cause notices only in a limited number of big cases where over Rs 5 lakh of tax was collected as TDS from employees and the same was not deposited with the Income Tax Department in time.

The remarks came after Congress leader and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram alleged that department’s “overzealousness” to prosecute taxpayers for failure to deposit TDS amounted to “tax terrorism”.

The CBDT said that some defaulter companies and vested interests were deliberately misleading the media to thwart action against themselves.

“Having deducted tax from employees and other taxpayers and not depositing the same in time in the government treasury is an offence punishable under the law. It also affects the interest of the employees from whose salary the tax has been deducted by the unscrupulous employers,” it said.

It added that in the last one month, only in 50 big cases prosecution notices had been issued, out of which, in 80 per cent of the cases the TDS tax default was above Rs 10 lakh and in 10 per cent cases, it was between Rs 5 and Rs 10 lakh. 

“In the remaining 10 per cent cases, TDS default is of more than Rs 1 crore… Prosecutions have also recently been launched against four big business houses where more than Rs 50 crore of tax was collected by them from the taxpayers and yet not deposited with the government in time,” it said.

The CBDT said that such “legal and rightful action” was being projected by the vested interests as if the department was going overboard to harass small employers. 

“It would be pertinent to note that in a country of 130 crore people where around six crore returns are filed every year, only a total of 1,400 prosecutions have been filed so far for various offences under the Income Tax Act during this financial year. 

“This, by any stretch of imagination, cannot be termed as mass harassment by the Income Tax Department. Therefore, to say that prosecution notices en masse have been sent to taxpayers for minor defaults is completely incorrect and misleading,” the CBDT added.

Nasheman News :  Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is in the US for a medical check up, will return home on Friday, well ahead of the Budget presentation on February 1, official sources said.

“The Finance Minister is set to return on the evening of January 25,” said a senior official. “The interim budget will be presented by him for sure,” he said. He added that the process for printing of Budget documents began on Monday. 

Jaitley, 66, left for the US on January 13 for what was believed to be a medical check-up relating to his kidney ailment. He had undergone a renal transplant surgery in May 2018.

However, there has been wide speculation that he may not be able to return early to present the interim budget, which will be his last before the general elections this year.

Jaitley had recently hinted that it may not be a simple interim budget or vote on account, which is generally the tradition in an election year. The full budget is presented by the new government after the elections.

“Ordinarily, there should be no reason why we should move away from that convention but there is a larger interest of the economy that always dictate what goes into that interim budget,” he said on Thursday.

Informed sources said that the government may roll out schemes to help increase farmers’ income, reduce farm input costs and raise credit flow to farmers. 

Ministers of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan and Shiv Pratap Shukla on Monday held the annual pre-budget ritual, Halwa Ceremony, to mark the beginning of printing of Budget documents in the North Block, the seat of Ministry of Finance.

NEW DELHI: Several positive and negative examples are being made to secure the Indian economy. According to a study conducted by the International Human Rights Group Oxfam, the wealth of Indian billionaires last year was Rs 2,200 crore. Is over.

The country’s wealthiest wealth grew by 39% last year; But the bottom 50% of the population below the country has seen a mere 3% increase. The Oxfam Study Report is today revealed on Monday.

World billionaire wealth globally is 12 percent higher than last year. That means their fortune is over $ 2.5 billion daily. 

At the same time, the poorest wealth of the world’s population has fallen by 11 percent. 

The Oxfam Report, an international human rights group released before the annual meeting of the five-day World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland’s ski resort town, has pointed out that the economic gap between rich and poor in the world is rising concerns. 

India’s total population The poorest Indians in the 10th, 13.6 crore, have been warned that they have fallen into debt since 2004.

Agencies

NashemanNews : Nepal’s central bank has announced the ban of Indian currency notes with denominations above Rs 100.

The Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) on Sunday issued a circular for the institutions licensed by it notifying them about the ban, reports Xinhua news agency. 

Nepal’s cabinet in December had decided to ban the use of these currency notes. 

The decision to ban these notes has come a time when the NRB has requested the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) arequesting the latter to allow Nepal to use currency notes with all denominations.

Currently, only the notes with a denomination of Rs 100 and below are freely exchangeable in Nepal.

Nasheman News : In an effort to accelerate indigenous production of defence systems, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday inaugurated a Tamil Nadu Defence Industrial Corridor here that is expected to attract Rs 3,123.50 crore worth of investment.

Inaugurating the corridor, Sitharaman said the Centre had decided to have two corridors – in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu – despite the demands from states like Karnataka and Maharashtra.

Tiruchirappalli is about 350 km from Chennai.

The Minister also spoke about the Defence Ministry’s initiatives to ensure that the Indian industry engages with the country’s armed forces to co-create best defence technologies.

According to Sitharaman, the development of these specialised corridors will facilitate a well planned and efficient industrial base.

Several public and private sector organisations announced investment projects worth about Rs 3,100 crore, said the Defence Ministry.

Major players like Lockheed Martin, LMW and others announced their plans to set up units in the corridor.

The Ordinance Factory Board (OFB) announced its plans to invest about Rs 2,305 crore in Tamil Nadu.

The companies that have announced their investments are: BEL (Rs 140.50 crore), BEML (Rs 40 crore), BDL (Rs 150 crore), MDL (Rs 15 crore), TVS (Rs 30 crore), Data Patterns (Rs 75 crore), Alpha Designs (Rs 100 crore), AIDAT (Rs 163 crore) and Aerospace Engineers (Rs 105 crore).

Speaking at the event, Vivek Lall, Vice President, Aeronautics Strategy and Business Development at Lockheed Martin, said the company has identified seven companies as potential manufacturers of components for future F-16 aircraft.

Sitharaman also launched CODISSIA Defence Innovation and Incubation Centre in Coimbatore through video conference.

Recently, a defence industrial corridor in Aligarh was launched.

Later speaking to reporters, Sitharaman said the opposition parties did not hear the government’s responses to the allegations made about the Rafale deal.

She said the opposition parties were flying paper planes, taking photos and shouting when Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was speaking and wondered how the Congress can say that the government’s answers were not satisfactory.

Nasheman News : Transport fuel rates were hiked sharply on Sunday as global crude oil rates continued to climb handsomely following the implementation of output cuts by global oil producers from January 1.

State-run oil marketing companies increased petrol rates by 23 paise per litre while diesel prices went up by 29-31 paise across the four major metros, making it among the sharpest hikes ever since rates had been rising this month following a prolonged period of fall. 

Petrol and diesel prices have increased by more than Rs 2 per litre each during January. 

As per data from Indian Oil Corp, petrol price in Delhi was increased to Rs 70.95 per litre on Sunday while in Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai the fuel cost Rs 73.05, Rs 76.58 and Rs 73.65 respectively.

Similarly, the price of diesel went up on Sunday in the national capital to Rs 65.45 per litre.

In Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai, diesel sold at Rs 67.23, Rs 68.53 and Rs 69.14 a litre respectively.

With petroleum products being outside the GST regime, prices vary as a result of local taxes. 

As per the country’s dynamic pricing mechanism, the domestic fuel prices depend upon international fuel prices on a 15-day average and the value of the rupee.

Following the implementation of production cuts by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and non-OPEC producers, global crude rates have been hardening and the UK Brent crude closed over the weekend at over $62 a barrel after having fallen below $50 last month. 

The agency is probing the case after taking cognisance of an FIR filed by the NIA against Naik, who is said to be based in Malaysia at present.

The ED has attached fresh assets worth Rs 16. 40 crore in connection with its money-laundering probe against controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, it said on Saturday.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), in a statement, said it had issued a provisional order for attachment of Naik’s assets, located in Mumbai and Pune, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The estimated value of the immovable assets was Rs 16.40 crore, the central probe agency said.

This is the third such attachment in the case by the ED.

The agency is probing the case after taking cognisance of an FIR filed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) against Naik, who is said to be based in Malaysia at present.

With the latest order, the total value of assets attached in the case by the ED stands at Rs 50.49 crore.

Nasheman News :Total liabilities of the government has increased 49 per cent to Rs 82 lakh crore in the last four-and-half years during the Narendra Modi government, as per the 8th Edition of the Status Paper on Government Debt released Friday.

Compared to the latest data available till September 2018 when the total debt of the Central government stood at Rs 82,03,253 crore, the corresponding amount till June 2014 was Rs 54,90,763 crore, the Finance Ministry’s data on government borrowings shows.

The huge surge in government’s debt has been propelled by 51.7 per cent growth in public debt from Rs 48 lakh crore to Rs 73 lakh crore in the four-and-half year period, which in turn was driven by 54 per cent rise in internal debt to about Rs 68 lakh crore.

Dependence on market loans show a similar rise of 47.5 per cent to more than Rs 52 lakh crore during the period. While debt raised through gold bonds was nil at the end of June 2014, it stood at Rs 9,089 crore including the gold monetisation scheme.

The Central government, in the status paper on government debt, gave a detailed analysis of the overall debt position of the government of India. It has been bringing out an annual status paper on government debt since 2010-11, the Finance Ministry said.

“The overall liabilities of the Central government are on a medium-term declining trajectory and government’s debt portfolio is characterised by prudent risk profile,” the paper, covering details of fiscal deficit financing operations of the government, however, said.

“Government is primarily resorting to market-linked borrowings for financing its fiscal deficit. Conventional indicators … indicate that debt profile of the government is comfortably placed in terms of debt sustainability parameters and is consistently improving,” it added.

While the country’s debt has been on the rise, little help is expected from the fiscal deficit side in the current financial year. The fiscal deficit in the first eight months till November stands at Rs 7.17 lakh crore, or 114.8 per cent of the Rs 6.24 lakh crore full year’s target.