Ravi Parthasarathy, former chairman of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS), passed away this morning in Mumbai after prolonged illness.
Parthasarathy was suffering from cancer and had been hospitalised since November last year. The death happened at home, according to one of his close family members who spoke to Moneycontrol.
Parthasarathy was 70. He became the CEO of IL&FS when it was founded in 1989 and was promoted to chairman in 2006. He retired in July 2018.
Parthasarathy was allegedly at the centre of the multicrore IL&FS scam. In June last year, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Chennai police arrested him in connection to the alleged Rs 1 lakh crore scam.
The IL&FS crisis surfaced in July 2018, when the company began defaulting on its debt repayments due to a severe liquidity crisis. The company collapsed in around August 2018, when it started defaulting on bonds.
The firm, which started as a road construction financing company, had quietly grown to around 347 subsidiaries and amassed a debt pile of about Rs 91,000 crore by the time the crisis broke out in the group.
The firm rolled over securities until things came to a grinding halt. Rating agencies, analysts and regulators waited till the last moment to act.
When IL&FS finally started to default on its payments to institutions, financial markets panicked. In October 2018, the government set up a panel under veteran banker Uday Kotak to get the resolution process rolling for the IL&FS empire.
Late last year, at the new board’s first annual general meeting, Kotak said through resolution the board expects to recover at least half of Rs 90,000 crore debt on IL&FS books. That work is still in progress.
In March this year, the board said it had resolved debt amounting to Rs 55,000 crore as of the end of that month, which accounts for around 90 percent of the estimated Rs 61,000 crore resolution target.
