Rich dividends, IFCI style

The Industrial Finance Corporation of India has not performed well in the past, and may well be unable to improve its financial health in the near future, but this sordid state of affairs has not deterred the organisation from giving its senior functionaries an impressive salary hike.

The IFCI board recently increased the salary of its chairman from about Rs 36,000 per month to Rs one lakh per month. Not only the chairman, but the executive directors and chief general managers too have benefited from the IFCI board’s largesse. Indeed, now the IFCI top brass will earn more than its counterpart in the Industrial Development Bank of India, which is the single largest shareholder in the financial institution. Wonder if the pay hike has anything to do with the Rs 1,000 crore bailout package agreed to by the government and shareholders!

Wake-up call for Andersen
Either Arthur Andersen was palming off an old report or it desperately needs to update itself on what is happening in the Indian telecommunications sector. In its presentation made at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s Global Telecom Summit on September 27, 2001, on ‘Connecting India — Key Issues’, Arthur Andersen talked about the “DTS (Department of Telecom Services) and VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited) corporatisation being round the corner.” Funny, considering DTS was corporatised more than a year ago amid much hype and in its current avatar is called Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. VSNL of course was corporatised years ago. That this was no typo was obvious from the fact that DTS got mentioned more than once in the presentation.