What broad direction is Religare Enterprises taking now with the restructuring plan that you have proposed? You have called a board meeting on June 8 for fundraising. Let us start with that.
It is nice to talk about good things about the company. The last two years, I was talking about how we could get to Religare 2.0. Religare Enterprises has been in the news for a lot of reasons and now we only want to talk about how the company is to be resurrected.
Religare Enterprises is a CIC company under which we have health insurance, RFL — an NBFC, housing finance and a broking company. These four companies are doing pretty well. The NBFC, for the longest period of time, was being talked about for the debt restructuring process. The June 7 circular of RBI provides an opportunity for companies like RFL to get a new lease of life. When this June 7 circular came, it was very exciting but unfortunately the first debt restructuring did not go through. But I appreciate the system because they not only see the end result of the company’s performance but also the journey and the intent of the company to do a good job.
I am extremely thankful to RBI and all the other regulators because they have been keeping a very close eye on our company to ensure whether it is happening the correct way as they are also the custodians of not only of the lenders but also of the shareholders. Good governance is something which really worked very well in our favour for these two years. Having said that, our intent really came up well when we repaid the banks Rs 7,000 odd crore in the last two years which I feel is quite unprecedented and during such difficult times.
Today I am very happy to announce that our debt restructuring process has been very sympathetically looked into by our lead bank and also by the consortium of lenders which had almost 18 members. It has not been very easy to get the trust back.
The restructuring process is happening for a reason. We are going ahead with the fund raising activity which the shareholders are very excited about. I am very thankful to shareholders for having complete trust in us. They have trusted their money with us and are ready to invest more with us.
The market is quite excited about the news that new funds will be coming in. How will new funds be utilised? Would you prefer the rights issue way where marquee shareholders like the Burman family and many others would consider Religare as a promoter would and also fund or would you also look for outside investors?
All the shareholders — big and small — including the Burman family have been very patiently waiting for the turnaround and all the other investors have also shown good interest in us. Not only have the existing shareholders shown interest in us but also of course the market has been very watchful. The team is discussing with them and trying to share with them whatever we can under the public domain. We are going to raise funds through the only way which is permissible under SEBI. . We have reached so far because we have been transparent.
