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DAILY HUNT September 19, 2018 As the rupee keeps falling to new lows, a top government official on Wednesday said it was a temporary phenomenon and the long-term path for rupee-dollar exchange rate was "quite stable". He also said the government will soon come out with the list of non-essential imports, which the government had earlier announced would be limited to check rising current account deficit. "The ten per cent depreciation in last few weeks might have actually shot down our economy a bit. But that's temporary," Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said at an event here. "Everybody understands and agrees that that's a temporary (phase). With such high growth and inflation differential, the long-term path for rupee versus dollar is quite stable," he said. Garg was speaking during an economic conclave on "Rural India: Road to $5 trillion economy" organised by the PHD Chamber of Commerce. He sa...

OUTLOOK September 19, 2018 Lalit .K. Jha Washington, Sep 19 The US on Wednesday said the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba militant groups continue to pose a regional threat and that Pakistan did not adequately address America's concerns on terrorism in 2017. Although al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been seriously degraded, remnants of its global leadership, as well as its regional affiliate al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), continued to operate from remote locations in the region that historically have been exploited as safe havens, the US State Department said in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism for the year 2017. "Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba continued to pose a regional threat in the subcontinent," it said. The report notes that from August to December 2017, the Trump administration placed a pause on spending new Foreign Military Financing for Pakistan, holding these funds until Pakistan addre...

The Indian Express September 19, 2018 The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has conducted searches at 11 locations in Delhi and Mumbai in connection with an international hawala racket running into more than Rs 700 crore, officials said on Tuesday. The racket and searches are related to Dubai-based hawala operator Pankaj Kapur and his associates. The ED has registered a case of forex violations against them under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), 1999. During the searches, ED claimed to have recovered cash to the tune of Rs 29.19 lakh apart from incriminating documents and items which include electronic gadgets, diaries having record of hawala transactions and stamp of more than 150 shell firms. Further investigation is under progress, officials said. ED sources said that the agency’s preliminary inquiry has revealed that the hawala transactions are being carried out by one of Kapur’s Indian companies, M/s Radhika Gems Pvt Ltd. The company allegedly collects money ...

The Indian Express  September 19, 2018 Billionaire Anil Ambani Tuesday announced that the cash-strapped Reliance Communications will be completely exiting the telecom business to concentrate on real estate in future. The first priority for RCom, which is credited for democratising telecom services through cheaper offers in early 2000s, is to resolve its over Rs 40,000 crore debt, he told shareholders at the company’s 14th annual general meeting here. “We have decided that we will not proceed in this sector. And many other companies have taken a similar call. This is very much a writing on the wall, the future… “As we have moved out of the mobile sector, we will monetise at an appropriate stage our enterprise business. Reliance Realty will be the engine of growth for the future of this company,” Ambani said. Pointing out to the 133-acre   Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City (DAKC) on the outskirts of the financial capital, he said there is huge realty play opportunity ...

The Indian Express September 19, 2018 Shaji Vikraman It has been more than 27 years since a committee headed by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor M Narasimham first made out a case for pruning the number of government or state-owned banks. That committee, which was appointed in 1991 by Manmohan Singh who was then Finance Minister, had recommended a restructuring of Indian banks, with three or four large banks including State Bank of India that could be positioned as global banks, besides eight to ten with a national footprint or presence, rather than having over two dozen state-owned banks. On Monday, after the weekend firefighting measures on the rupee front, the government announced the amalgamation of three banks — Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank — aimed at creating the country’s third largest bank with a business of Rs 14.82 lakh crore and over 9,600 branches across the country. For long, it has been recognised that having several banks that are majority-owne...

The Indian Express September 19, 2018 A year after the Income Tax Department conducted searches on Karnataka minister D K Shivakumar, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has registered a case of money-laundering against him. More than 60 premises associated with Shivakumar were searched on August 1 last year, days before the Rajya Sabha elections in Gujarat. ED sources said the agency booked Shivakumar among others with regard to Rs 8 crore in cash recovered from his Safdarjung Enclave home. “With regard to that recovery, the I-T department has invoked Section 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). This section is a scheduled offence and thus falls under the purview of predicate offences under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA),” an ED officer said. The agency has also booked Anjaneya Haumanthaiah, an employee at Karnataka Bhavan in New Delhi, and N Rajendran, a former Karnataka Bhavan employee, in the case. The August 2017 searches had led ...

The Indian Express September 19, 2018 Ritu Sarin In November 2015, the CBI, as reported by The Indian Express Tuesday, put on record that Vijay  Mallya should not be detained when he arrived in Delhi from London ; four months later his bankers reportedly didn’t act on the legal advice they got to restrain him when he flew back to London. It was British authorities in London, a year later, who red-flagged a 17.86-million pound (Rs 170 crore) transfer Mallya made to a bank in Switzerland. Sources have told The Indian Express that it was this alert by UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU), on June 28, 2017, that was communicated to Indian investigating agencies and triggered the move for Mallya’s 13 lending banks to form a consortium and jointly move towards freezing of his assets in the UK. Sources have confirmed that Mallya’s bank transfer was converted into an  SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) by the UKFIU and marked for information to the Central Bure au of Inv...

The Indian Express September 19, 2018 ICICI Bank is in talks with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to settle alleged regulatory lapses involving its managing director and chief executive officer Chanda Kochhar, Videocon group and NuPower Renewables, a company run by Chanda Kochhar’s husband Deepak Kochhar, through the consent mechanism, chairman of the capital market regulator Ajay Tyagi said on Tuesday. Under the consent settlement process, an entity facing a probe by Sebi is subjected to certain fees and restrictions without admission or denial of alleged irregularities and the regulator thereafter drops its charges and investigations with a caveat that all disclosures made to it are correct. Tyagi said the regulator has received the reply of the bank to its show-cause notice with respect to a probe into alleged lapses in disclosure norms by Kochhar under the securities law. An ICICI Bank spokesperson said, “We have submitted our response to the s...

DAWN September 17, 2018 Ikram Junaidi The Senate Standing Committee on Interior will discuss on Monday (today) the issue of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and Pakistan’s plan to get out of its grey list. According to the agenda of the meeting, the committee chaired by Senator Rehman Malik of the Pakistan Peoples Party will examine the details of the FATF’s demands and allegations against Pakistan. The committee will also consider the steps taken by Islamabad to get out of the FATF grey list, and any progress, if at all, that has been made so far. The Paris-based FATF is a global body that combats terrorist financing and money laundering. Its decision to place Pakistan on the global money-laundering grey list was made during a meeting in February. In June, Pakistan was officially placed on the list. Pakistan believes it has done a lot to get out of the grey list, such as banning both Jamaatud Dawa and its offshoot, Falah-i-Insaniyat. Their operations h...

FIRST POST September 19, 2018 SUHIT K SEN Nine Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have written to the European Union's (EU) highest official on foreign affairs and security policy, Federica Mogherini, to cancel all agreements with India till all the activists arrested in connection with the violence at Bhima Koregaon have been released. The letter, scathingly denunciatory in tone and content, was written on 12 September. It points out that all the people held — those earlier arrested now lodged in prison and undergoing trial and those held at dawn on 28 August now under house arrest — have been charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The letter describes this piece of legislation as 'one of the most barbaric laws, copied from the colonial law book'. It also details the plight of Professor GN Saibaba, a man with severe disabilities, who has been convicted for doing 'nothing but defend the rights of the Adivasis and Dalit people with w...