House panel to summon IL&FS board, LIC & SBI representatives, RBI officials

NEW DELHI: The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance has decided to summon the newly appointed chairman and board members of the debt-ridden Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS), representatives of the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the State Bank of India — both major stakeholders in IL&FS — and RBI officials to appear before it on October 30 to explain the reasons for the mess, sources in the committee have revealed.

Though the standing committee had decided to call senior officials of the finance ministry and the Sebi on October 23, sources said it has now been postponed to November. Also, the committee is yet to discuss the possibility of summoning the sacked members of the earlier IL&FS board.

The committee meeting on Wednesday took up the IL&FS matter following chairman Veerappa Moily’s proposal to that effect. ET had reported in its Wednesday edition Moily’s plan to get the committee take up the matter.


After Moily’s suggestion, especially on the grounds that IL&FS matter involves the larger issue of bad loans and non-performing assets, BJP’s Nishikant Dubey suggested the IL&FS brass be called first and then the finance ministry officials.

The standing committee move comes within two days of the government appointing Uday Kotak as new chairman of IL&FS and GC Chaturvedi, GN Bajpai, Malini Shankar, Vineet Nayyar and Nand Kishore as new board members after sacking the earlier 15-member board in the wake of the IL&FS crisis.

“First, the committee would like to hear from the new chairman and board members of IL&FS on how things went wrong in the public limited company and their recovery plans. We would also like to hear from the stakeholders (LIC and SBI) why their members in the earlier board failed to raise the alarm on time. This will be the beginning of a series of deliberations,” said a senior member of the parliamentary committee.

The move coincides with the issue snowballing into a BJP-Congress tussle, with the opposition party alleging a “major scam” and the government rejecting the charge.