Four independent directors join PFS
Premium- On 19 January, three independent directors of the company had resigned citing lapses in governance and compliance.
NEW DELHI : PTC India Financial Services (PFS) on Wednesday inducted four independent directors from its parent firm PTC India, with the posts vacant for more than two months.
On 19 January, three independent directors of the company had resigned citing lapses in governance and compliance.
Capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had sought an explanation from the company following the resignations and blocked the company's efforts to hold a board meeting without the appointment of new independent directors, Mint had reported earlier. As a result, PTC India was also forced to defer the approval for its Q3 results earlier.
“The board through a resolution passed by circulation on Tuesday has approved the appointment of Sushama Nath, Devendra Swaroop Saksena, Ramesh Narain Misra, and Jayant Purushottam Gokhale, as independent directors on the board," PFS said in a filing to the stock exchanges.
While Sushama Nath is former secretary ministry of finance, Devendra Swaroop Saksena is ex- principal chief commissioner of income tax, Mumbai, as per the corporate filing.
Jayant Purushottam Gokhale is partner in Mumbai-based chartered accountancy firm at Gokhale & Sathe, and Ramesh Narain Misra was chairman and managing director at Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam.
Kamlesh Vikamsey, Thomas Mathew, and Santosh Nayar had resigned as independent directors of PFS. Following this, former bureaucrat Rakesh Kacker had also stepped down as an independent director from the board of PTC India citing mis-governance in the subsidiary.
The directors had alleged that management failed to act on “various instances of serious lapses in corporate governance". Another reason that triggered the sudden exits pertained to loan account of NSL Nagapatnam Power.
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It was alleged that the forensic report on the loan account of NSL Nagapatnam Power Loan of ₹125 crore was withheld from the board for two years and was disclosed only in December 2020.
Further changes were made to terms of a ₹150-crore loan for a road project.
Repayment timelines were changed without board approval. The directors said a committee of two independent directors had suggested that the Nagapatnam issue be reported to Reserve Bank of India “as a suspected fraud".
PTC India CMD Rajib K. Mishra in a media briefing had termed the barrage of allegations made by the three outgoing independent directors an attempt to “malign" the company
Mishra had said the independent directors who had quit decided to “pull the cat out of their bag" when they were trying to leave the organisation. He added that his attempts to understand their issue failed despite spending hours with them.
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