The emergency board meeting of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) here on Friday remained inconclusive as the shareholders could not agree on the way forward.

According to sources close to the company, the board will reconvene on September 15. While there was no official communication from the company, a second source said the board was divided on the issue of seeking fresh funding of around ₹3,000 crore from the key shareholders — LIC and SBI. The money is to pare the debt of some of the group companies that have failed to meet payment obligations.

The consolidated debt of the diversified yet unlisted conglomerate is estimated at ₹1-lakh crore.

Last month, the IL&FS board approved a rights issue of 30 crore equity shares at ₹150 apiece aggregating to ₹4,500 crore.

The issue was supposed to be completed by the end of October.

However, after IL&FS Financial Services (IFIN) was banned from accessing the commercial paper market till February 2019, as it had defaulted on its short-term borrowings, the IL&FS management had to seek urgent liquidity infusion to prevent loan recalls.

In August, the IL&FS board had approved ₹5,000-crore recapitalisation of IFIN, IL&FS Transportation, IL&FS Energy, IL&FS Environment and IL&FS Education.

The board had also approved a massive asset divestment plan based on which the company expected to reduce its overall debt by ₹30,000 crore in 12-18 months. The company expects to sell 14 out of its 25 road assets for which it is currently in talks with several strategic buyers including Lone Star and ISquared Capital.

Rating downgrade

Over the past several months, rating agencies have downgraded the debt instruments of IL&FS, its subsidiaries and the special purpose vehicles housed under those subsidiaries, with some of them being assigned ‘default’ rating.

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