Notwithstanding the year-long tussle between Dish TV promoter Jawahar Goel and YES Bank, the satellite TV service provider almost halved its debt in fiscal 2022. According to Dish TV’s annual report for FY22, the company was focussed on deleveraging its balance sheet for the fourth year in a row, and paid ₹434.3 crore of debt in fiscal 2022. The company has an overall debt of ₹375.6 crore at present. It started fiscal 2021 with an overall debt of ₹809.9 crore. Therefore, in fiscal 2022, the company reduced its debt by 53 per cent.
Corporate war
This comes even as YES Bank and Dish TV wage a corporate war over the unpaid dues of Dish promoters, the Essel Group. The exact debt amount payable to YES Bank was not reported in the annual report. In a previous interaction with BusinessLine in March, Essel patriarch Subhash Chandra noted that the company’s debt to its lenders was around ₹350 crore. The bank had provided Essel Group companies with a ₹5,270-crore loan, against a pledge of Dish TV shares in 2016.
At present, the bank owns a 25 per cent stake in the company worth ₹700 crore. In a recent win for YES Bank, Jawahar Goel, Subhash Chandra’s brother, agreed to step down from the board during the company’s September 26 AGM.
The satellite television service provider has been slowly acquiescing to YES Bank’s demands from September 5, 2021. Earlier this month, Dish also agreed to appoint three of the seven independent directors, proposed by YES Bank in the September 5 letter. Thus, YES Bank approved that Girish Paranjpe, Arvindnachya Chandranachya and Madan Mohanlal Verma would join Dish’s board.
The company’s losses widened in their concreted efforts to pay off debt. Loss for FY22 was ₹1,867 crore, in comparison, the company’s loss for FY21 was at ₹1,189.8 crore. In order to optimise costs, the company reduced its expenses by 6 per cent in FY22.
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