Comments
Yes Bank Ltd’s latest $2 billion rescue plan was perfect except for one minor detail: Most suitors for the beleaguered Indian lender are not the kind the board can really take to meet the regulator for tea. Yet in a five-hour meeting on Tuesday, the directors decided to do exactly that: Jane Austen would have been proud of their desperation to marry off Yes Bank.
Also read:Yes Bank to favourably consider Citax’s $500 million investment offer
Take Erwin Singh Braich, a mysterious Canadian tycoon offering to post three-fifths of the money together with a partner. Braich says he is Canada’s richest man, but he has no headquarters, no banker to manage his money, and is currently living in a three-star motel in the Canadian prairies, write Bloomberg News reporters Natalie Obiko Pearson and Suvashree Ghosh. Braich, they show, is also the subject of a 1999 involuntary bankruptcy orchestrated, he claims, by opponents, including his brother which remains undischarged with more than C$13 million ($10 million) in total liabilities. But Yes Bank believes his binding offer deserves to remain on the table, so there it will be.
Two other interested buyers Hong Kong-based SPGP Holdings, bidding jointly with Braich, and London-based Citax Holdings Ltd have previously shied away from putting up small sums to acquire Indian businesses in bankruptcy.
In a note, Suresh Ganapathy, the Macquarie Capital Securities banking analyst in Mumbai, expressed serious reservations regarding the quality of the board of directors who are willing to consider these kinds of investors to be large shareholders.
The board does not express an iota of self-doubt. Its willing to favourably consider the $500 million offer by Citax, and decide on allotting shares in the next meeting of directors, subject to requisite regulatory approvals, Yes Bank said. If those permissions materialize, they’ll show the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to be even more desperate than Yes Bank.
As I have written before, Yes Bank is skating on a thin layer of capital. And that’s scary. Confidence in India’s bad-loan-laden banking system is ebbing; depositors are seething over regulatory restrictions placed on accessing their own money in a failed cooperative bank. Yes Bank, India’s fifth-largest private-sector lender, can’t be left adrift much longer. But the RBI is so distracted fighting other fires that it would rather not have to think about Yes Bank.
If not now,when?
It’s been nine months since former Deutsche Bank AG executive Ravneet Gill became chief executive officer with a mandate to clean up the bank, whose asset quality was destroyed by the previous owner-managers cavalier underwriting.
It’s been seven months since the RBI used special powers to appoint a former deputy governor as a director. But for all the chaperoning and assurances from Gill, especially about raising funds, the outlook is getting bleaker.
RBI must act
Gross non-performing loans jumped to 7.4 per cent of total assets in September from 5 per cent in June. Last month, the bank disclosed that the regulator had found its non-performing assets on March 31 to be $460 million higher than it had reported earlier.
This is the third year when RBI has identified a divergence in the bank’s reported financials, Moody’s Investors Service said, while lowering the bank’s credit rating by two levels to B2, deep into junk-bond territory.
That cut is bound to complicate Yes Bank’s ability to attract fresh deposits from institutions at a time when current account and savings account deposits the cheapest source of financing plunged 14 per cent from a year earlier in the September quarter.
A $273 million share sale in August has shored up the Tier-1 equity ratio to 8.7 per cent, but its a temporary reprieve. Yes Bank has a quarter of its assets tied up as credit to shadow banks, real estate, and engineering and construction companies, some of the most dangerously fund-starved industries in India.
IDFC Securities Ltd estimates $7 billion of stressed loans at Yes Bank. Assuming 65 per cent eventually goes bad, the slippage would be more than the banks net worth.
Its perhaps time to work off that very assumption. Merging the bank with a bigger franchise such as ICICI Bank Ltd or Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd at a next-to-nil equity value would be a better option than continuing the ongoing fundraising charade. In other words, Yes Bank, which has lost 87 per cent of its market value since August 2018, needs an arranged match, brokered by the RBI.
Braich, the Canadian suitor, said he loves the logo: “If it was called No Bank, I wouldn’t have been interested.” Even if a joke, this is serious. The shock to India’s broken financial system risks being even bigger than the collapse of infrastructure financier IL&FS Group in September 2018.
The RBI must act before Yes Bank becomes, for all practical purposes, no bank at all.
(The author of this story Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist)
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.