RBI withdraws permission to open new branches of Bandhan Bank
Kolkata, Sep 28 : Private-lender Bandhan Bank on Friday said the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has withdrawn its general permission to open new branches and frozen the remuneration of the lender's MD and CEO Chandra Shekhar Ghosh till further notice as it failed to comply with a licensing condition.
"RBI has communicated to us that since the Bank was not able to bring down the shareholding of Non Operative Financial Holding Company (NOFHC) to 40 per cent, as required under the licensing condition, general permission to open new branches stands withdrawn and the Bank can open branches with prior approval of RBI and the remuneration of the MD & CEO of the Bank stands frozen at the existing level, till further notice," it said in a regulatory filing.
The Bank is taking necessary steps to comply with the licensing condition to bring down the shareholding of NOFHC in the Bank to 40 per cent and shall continue to engage with the RBI in this regard, it added.
According to RBI's new banking licensing norms, any bank offering "universal" services will have to bring down the promoter holding to 40 per cent in three years from the date of commencement of business.
Kolkata-based Bandhan Bank, which was the first instance in the country of a microfinance entity transforming in to a universal bank, completed three years of operations this August.
Bandhan Financial Holdings Ltd (BFHL), the promoting entity of Bandhan Bank, is owned by Bandhan Financial Services Ltd (BFSL). The promoter holding in the bank currently stands at around 82 per cent after a successful Initial Public Offer (IPO) launched in March this year.
Before IPO, the promoter holding in the bank was nearly 89 per cent.
Significantly, the capital market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India's rules mandate one year's lock-in period for promoter holding after an IPO.
Ghosh was unavailable to comment on the RBI restrictions. Sources in the bank, however, said the restrictions imposed on the new branch expansion "will not impact its present operation".
According to information available in the bank's website, it has 937 branches and 2,764 doorstep service centres.
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India geared up for 'high degree' of urgency, says Jaishankar on trade deal negotiations with US, EU
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New Delhi (PTI): The Trump administration was quick in responding to what was tabled for a bilateral trade pact with India and New Delhi is geared up for a "very high" degree of urgency in concluding trade deals with the US and the European Union, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said on Friday.
In an interactive session at the Global Technology Summit, Jaishankar said the US under President Donald Trump has fundamentally changed its approach to engaging with the world and it has consequences across every key domain, especially in the technology sector.
Jaishankar's remarks come as Trump's policy on tariffs has triggered massive trade disruptions and fears of a global economic recession.
On Wednesday, Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs on all countries, except China.
In his remarks, Jaishankar, without sharing any specific details of negotiations between India and the US on the proposed trade pact, indicated that New Delhi was keen to conclude it as early as possible.
"Within a month of change in the administration, we have conceptually an agreement that we will do a bilateral trade agreement; that we will find a fix that will work for both of us because we have our concerns too. And its not an open-ended process," the minister said.
"We did four years of talking with the first Trump administration. They have their view of us and frankly we have our view of them. The bottom line is that the deal did not get through," he said.
Jaishankar also referred to India's negotiations with the European Union for a free trade agreement.
"If you look at the EU, often people say we've been negotiating for 23 years which is not entirely true because we had big blocks of time when nobody was even talking to somebody else. But they have tended to be very protracted processes," he said.
"This time around, we are certainly geared up for a very high degree of urgency. I mean, we see a window here. Our trade teams are really charged up," he said.
"These (Indian negotiators) are people very much on top of their game, very ambitious about what they want to achieve," he said.
"We are trying to in each case get the other side to speed it up. This was normally a complaint which was to be made about us in the past, that we were the guys slowing it down," he said, adding, "It's actually the other way around today. We are trying to communicate that urgency to all three accounts (the US, EU, the UK)."
"My sense probably is in terms of other parties' response -- at least the US has been so far fairly quick to respond to whatever has been tabled. Now we have to see how that picks up," he said.
