The case file that you linked earlier had his name spelled as Sachindra Nath, and I carried over the typo in my search thinking that was the way one spelled his name. I realised this only while reading through the old Religare annual reports. When I ran his actual name through the law database, we have one more hit:
https://www.legitquest.com/case/kavi-arora-v-state/1BC944
This is one of the people who was arrested and charged. Here’s the relevant excerpt:
When the Petitioner joined RFL there was a clear understanding that RFL will remain a Retail SME Lending Company and other businesses will be demerged and taken out of this entity.
Capital Market Lending was run as a separate business for which another NBFC license was obtained from RBI under the name of Religare Finance Ltd. An announcement was also made to this effect to the entire senior management of Religare Group in February 2010 by Shachindra Nath, then Group Chief Operating Officer (COO) REL and further reiterated in the group announcement made in April 2010 by Shachindra Nath, who was by then elevated to the position of Group Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Under his guidance and supervision the SME business loan book grew from Rs. 264 Cr. in 2009 to Rs.15,976 Cr in 2016. The total Revenue on the other hand grew from Rs.11 Cr. in 2009 to Rs.2,062 Cr. in 2016. However, not a single loan transaction under the SME business has come under any kind of scanner or investigation by the RBI and neither has been questioned in the investigation in the present case. In fact, while the Petitioners mandate was to handle the new SME lending business, it was the REL team responsible for managing the already existing Inter-Corporate Deposit (Later named as CLB) and loan against shares business, which were never under the control and supervision of the Petitioner, and in respect of which the Respondent has instituted the said criminal proceedings in the aforementioned F.I.R.
All the people who have been arrested say the same things; that the loans were never under their purview. Secondly, there’s a direct contradiction between the news article that spoke about the RBI warnings and this statement, but these are words said during a legal defense and are most definitely biased.
The Religare mission statement from their annual reports is enough to make one distrust any piece of document written by a company:
The Godhwani bail plea sheds some light on how this was all possible:
REL and RFL both had a distinct boards comprising of members majorly including relatives and friends (especially father in law of MMS-Sh. Harpal Singh) of the promoters who were always there to watch the interest of the erstwhile promoters MMS & SMS, and MMS/SMS have been stepping in and out of the board of different companies under the brand `RELIGARE’ as per their wishes and fancies.
On your recent post, the fact that they have these measures is comforting to a degree, but it brings with it the tradeoff that Mr. Nath can’t make decisions alone. We’ve seen with IDFC First Bank how certain goals/policies have changed recently while needing to cater to promoters, and the governance framework at Ugro is open to the same problems.
As investors we always have the benefit of watching a company over time, and we’ve arrived at Chapter 1 knowing what to watch for. There’s time to put all of these questions to the management. However, what bothers me is that ultimately this happened under his watch. One could talk about the complex nature of many subsidiaries, different boards and politics within it, his possible guilt vs negligence… At the end of the day, this happened under him, and the worry is of the ability to be cognizant of bad apples within the organisation. Perhaps this warrants a discussion on the people brought in from the RBI and SEBI.