Jet Airways insolvency: Kalrock Capital contests reports of winning bid, says lenders still deliberating

Kalrock Capital has contested a report that quotes its senior official saying that it has won the bid for Jet Airways.

In response to Moneycontrol's mail, Manoj Madnani, Board Member of the UK-based financial services firm, replied:

"The Jalan-Kalrock Consortium has not made any comment on the ongoing resolution process of Jet Airways and/or regarding its submitted resolution plan for Jet Airways (India) Ltd and fully respects the current process as the lenders are still deliberating on the matter and have not reached a conclusion yet."

Twitter went abuzz from October 7 late evening with many users sharing that the Kalrock-Jalan consortium has come out as the winner in the race for Jet Airways.

Many of the Twitterati said that the consortium had got the required percentage of votes - over 60 percent - from Jet Airways lenders to come on top. It is up against the consortium led by FSTC and includes Imperial Capital.

Madnani added that the combine shall not be making any public comments until an official response is received from the resolution professional.

"The concerned reporter called our office in London and a response was given of "NO COMMENTS" in line with our policy of not commenting on the ongoing resolution process for Jet Airways until there is a communicated public outcome. Therefore we were surprised to see the inaccuracy in the below mentioned article," Madnani said in the written reply. 

Lenders and the resolution professional overseeing the process have been tight-lipped. A senior executive from the industry said that the voting will be on till October 16.

State Bank of India is the lead lender. The carrier owes banks Rs 8,000 crore and faces total claims of Rs 40,000 crore. October 21 is the deadline for Jet Airways' insolvency process to be completed.

The voting began after the Committee of Creditors had met on October 3 to evaluate the two bids. The meeting was preceded by a bit of drama when it emerged that there was a legal issue with the FSTC-Imperial bid. The voting was this postponed.