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By: PTI | New Delhi | Published: February 27, 2018 10:06 PM Monetisation of 105 road projects can easily fetch Rs 1.25 lakh crore and there is no dearth of funds for building highways, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said today. The road transport minister also said the highways ministry plans to complete projects worth Rs 15 lakh crore by 2019. “Now we have decided to monetise the road projects. There are 105 projects that are ready. We can easily get Rs 1.25 lakh crore from monetisation of these,” Gadkari said while addressing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank annual meeting here. The highways and shipping sectors in India today are financially very sound and offer tremendous investment opportunities under their flagship programmes — Bharatmala and Sagarmala, as well as other ongoing programmes, said Gadkari, who also holds the shipping and water resources portfolios. Emphasising that this was the “golden time” to invest in the road and shipping sectors in the country, the...

Feb 28, 2018  Firestar Diamond Inc, the flagship company of Nirav Modi, has filed for bankruptcy in the US. The move would suggest that the diamantaire is now trying to ring-fence his US assets from any criminal suit that Indian authorities may be contemplating against Nirav and his entities. Firestar Diamond Inc is registered in the state of Delaware. The case has been filed under chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy code in a court filing in the Southern District of New York on Monday. The company claimed it had listed assets and liabilities in the range of $50 million and $100 million. The case will come up before Judge Sean H. Lane. The filing was made by Ian R. Winters of the New York-based attorney firm Klestadt Winters Jureller Southard & Stevens LLP, which describes itself as a boutique commercial law firm. The firm specialises in bankruptcy cases and its website shows a long list of jewellery entities as its clients. Nirav and his uncle Mehul Choks...

Published: February 28, 2018 4:34 AM The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) has put a sturdier regulator, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India, on the lines of SEBI and IRDAI. The Act aimed to resolve the mounting issue of non-performing loans by corporates and find a lasting solution for stressed balance sheets of banks. IBC sought to subsume the existing frameworks for bad loan resolution by creating a single law. Any stressed asset red-flagged to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) by lenders under IBC is referred to a registered and recognised insolvency resolution professional. In case the resolution attempts did not fructify, the professional can refer the case to a Committee of Creditors (CoC) to kick-start the liquidation process by putting the assets on block. The new bankruptcy norms were rolled out as existing mechanisms proved inefficacious. Till IBC kicked in, the absence of a single law dealing with corporates going bust and overlapping jurisdiction m...

MICHAEL KUGELMAN  26 February, 2018 Pakistan may have dodged a bigger bullet, but it’s far from being out of the woods. After much anticipation, speculation, and confusion, we now know that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has put Pakistan on a terrorism financing watchlist. Well, sort of. FATF decided to “grey list” Pakistan, but the designation won’t formally take effect until June—hence why FATF didn’t mention Pakistan in a report it issued Friday. Admittedly, the FATF’s deliberations are opaque and its procedures byzantine. But this much is true: Pakistan is on its way to the watchlist. Pakistani financial journalist Khurram Husain, who understands FATF well, put it to me this way Saturday: FATF has passed a motion to grey list Pakistan. The motion identifies deficiencies in Pakistani efforts to combat terrorist financing. “As per FATF procedures,” he said, “an action plan will be developed by Pakistan and FATF to address the deficiencies identified in the mo...

February 26, 2018 Pakistan finds itself in the eye of yet another storm. It employed every diplomatic and fire-fighting trick in the book to keep itself off the list of defaulting countries maintained by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) at the FATF Plenary held in February 2018. Pakistan’s desperation underlines the increasing effectiveness of the organisation, which has become the spearhead against global efforts combating the financing of terrorism (CFT). This brief will analyse the basis for FATF’s growing effectiveness in the fight against terrorist finance and how this could enhance Pakistan’s CFT compliance over time. FATF: Key Roles The FATF has been at the forefront of international efforts to fight money laundering and CFT. Its efforts have been in conjunction with relevant resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), especially in the aftermath of 9/11. FATF is an inter-governmental body set up in 1989, with an aim to “set standards and promote...

Maulik Vyas, Feb 27, 2018 The Bombay High Court has ruled in favour of Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) after a vendor sued the energy firm for cancelling a Rs1,000 crore contract. Core Offshore Services Pvt. Ltd had dragged ONGC to court saying that its tender was accepted by the state-owned energy firm and later cancelled without giving the vendor an opportunity to present its case. The genesis of the dispute lies in the tender floated by ONGC for charter hire of barges and tugs for its operation near its Mumbai offshore in January 2015. According to Core Offshore, in October 2015, it had received a letter from ONGC which confirmed that their offer was shortlisted. However, another bidder Halani Shipping Pvt Ltd had complained about the entire tender process to the Independent External Monitor (IEM) appointed by the government under the integrity pact program to maintain transparency in high stake bids. After hearing Halani, the external monitor had observed that th...

SUBRATA SAHA, Feb 28, 2018 Connectivity projects on India’s NE border have been overly delayed. This not only drains finances, it compromises security Budget 2018 has stated the Government’s intent to develop the nation’s military capabilities both in terms of developing connectivity infrastructure and modernising the armed forces. With the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor rapidly taking shape, the China-Pakistan embrace has got much tighter as has the convergence between China and Russia. China has intensified military engagements with several South Asian and Indian Ocean region states. Most recent is the unconfirmed report of China exploring possibility of a military base in Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan. Big on belligerence Since 2013, the level of belligerence along the Line of Actual Control has been increasing — Depsang, Chumar and the prolonged face-off at Doklam last year are indicative of this. From a small, ostensibly anti-piracy deployment in 2013-14...

Tuesday, 27 February 2018 09:13 WRITTEN BY KHADIJA SHARIFE (OCCRP) AND JOSY JOSEPH India’s state-owned Bank of Baroda -- one of the country’s largest -- played a crucial role in the financial machinations of South Africa’s politically influential Gupta family, allowing them to move hundreds of millions of dollars originating in alleged dirty deals into offshore accounts, an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) and The Hindu has found. The bank’s Indian head office denies any wrongdoing in the affair. But interviews and documents obtained by reporters prove otherwise. The documents show that the bank’s South African branch issued unapproved loan guarantees, quashed internal compliance efforts, and prevented regulators from learning about suspicious transactions in a way that benefited the Guptas’ network. This report reveals new details of a scandal that has rocked South Africa in recent months. The Gupta brothers -- Atul, Ajay, and Raj...