As the RBI stitched together a draft scheme of reconstruction for YES Bank on Friday, the bank’s co-founder and former Managing Director and CEO Rana Kapoor said that he has been not been involved with the bank for over 13 months but hopes to see a much larger bank version of the lender from April 2020 under State Bank of India.

“With a white knight and blue blooded pedigree of SBI, I hope that from April 2020 Version 4 of YES Bank should be a large bank with a new promoter and anchor investor. Nobody better than SBI for this,” he said.

When asked about what went wrong at the private sector lender, Kapoor, who is in Mumbai, told BusinessLine that there may have been some gap between the expectation for capital raise and reality.

“I don’t have access to what happened. A bank as a public trust institution has to deliver on commitments it makes. There may be a gap in terms of expectations that were built on capital raise and the actual lack of final delivery despite lot of efforts and good intentions,” he said. He further said that till his tenure at YES Bank, which ended on January 31, 2019, the lender had a successful track record and ‘AAA’ ratings and had been successful in raising capital at competitive prices.

“We had adequate provisions, we were the third most profitable bank in the country...We were getting excellent support of RBI and SEBI for our expansion approvals. We had raised all forms of capital — three very successful QIPs between 2010 and 2017,” he noted, adding that overall the capital fund of the bank including AT-1 bonds and Tier II bonds was about ₹52,500 crore.

“After that what happened, I don’t have any explanation,” he said.

Corporate governance

When asked about concerns about corporate governance, Kapoor said he was not sure of the issues being highlighted and said the superseded Board would be in a better position to respond.

“There were some divergences which was true of 36 other banks in the country,” he said, pointing out that for 2018 there was no divergence.

Published on March 6, 2020