...followed by financial services, IT, and sales and marketing.
ICC CEO Manu Sawhney was sent on 'leave' in March after his conduct came under the scanner during an internal investigation by by audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police has filed an FIR against former BharatPe co-founder Ashneer Grover, his wife Madhuri Jain Grover and family members Deepak Gupta, Suresh Jain and Shwetank Jain for an alleged Rs 81 crore fraud after a complaint by the fintech unicorn. The FIR, a copy of which has been seen by PTI, was filed under eight sections of the Indian Penal Code, including 406 that deals with criminal breach of trust, 420 (cheating and dishonesty), 467 and 468 (forgery). BharatPe in the complaint alleged that Grover and his family caused damages of about Rs 81.3 crore through illegitimate payments to bogus human resource consultants, inflated and undue payments through passthrough vendors connected to the accused, sham transactions in input tax credit and payment of penalty to GST authorities, illegal payment to travel agencies, forged invoices by Madhuri Jain and destruction of evidence.
India has 50 startups with the potential to achieve the coveted 'unicorn' status in 2022 and by the end of the year, the list of the new-age companies valued at over $1 billion will be at least 100, a report by a consultancy firm said on Monday. In 2021, which witnessed a huge spike in company valuations in the listed and unlisted space driven by ample liquidity, according to some watchers, India added 43 startups to the list and the number of unicorns shot up to 68 by the end of the year. Over $10 billion was invested in the Indian startup ecosystem in the October-December quarter alone, according to the report by PwC India.
BharatPe co-founder Shashvat Nakrani has accused Ashneer Grover, with whom he had co-founded the payment startup, of creating a false narrative about the company, and said the board acted quickly and decisively in unseating him after receiving finds of a PwC report. BharatPe, which allows shop owners to make digital payments through QR codes, last week stripped Grover of all titles and positions over his alleged "misdeeds" and may take further legal actions, including clawing back of some of his shareholding. In a letter to employees, Nakrani said the Grover episode was an aberration and not the norm at BharatPe, and went on to defend the board who he said were celebrated names in the banking and financial services industry.
Airports hold pride of place in the government's National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) programme to monetise public assets. Private airport operators, including the Adani group, Fairfax, GMR and Zurich Airport, are expected to evince interest in the next round of public private partnership (PPP) development of state-owned Airport Authority of India (AAI) airports. Industry analysts, however, do not expect bids to be as high as the last round, which saw Adani group gain control of six airports.
The average time lag between the date of occurrence of a fraud and its detection is 23 months; for large frauds (Rs 100 crore and above), it was 57 months.
According to the latest Budget papers, the staff strength of central ministries and departments is estimated to rise by 276,796 to 3.44 million at the end of FY23, it would be up by 109,266 to 3.55 million in March 2024.
Tesla Inc chief Elon Musk is set to acquire micro-blogging site Twitter for about $44 billion. Back home, India Inc, too, is seeing aggressive merger and acquisition (M&A) activity with PVR-Inox and HDFC-HDFC Bank announcing their mergers recently. While Axis Bank recently acquired Citi India's India retail business, reports suggest Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) and Mindtree could be eyeing a merger.
The external environment has worsened further. While the Finnish economy entered into a recession, Swedish economic growth also dipped. The Finnish gross domestic product (GDP) dropped 0.6 per cent in October-December, 2022. It was the second quarter of negative growth, which is a technical definition of recession.
Boroscopic inspection of all operational engines of all Q400 engines within one week, immediate inspection of Magnetic Chip Detectors (MCD), drawing of engine oil samples every 15 days for analysis and inspection of bleed-off valve screen and housing for evidence of oil wetness in weekly check, are among the other directions.
India overtook China to add the most number of new unicorns--start-ups valued at $1 billion or more--in the first half of 2022 despite a funding winter haunting entrepreneurs in the south Asian nation. India added 14 new unicorns in the period (H1 2022) and China had 11, according to the Hurun Global Unicorn Index 2022. The US led the ranking by adding 138 start-ups in the unicorn club.
The government could look at providing deductions for expenses incurred by salaried employees while working from home in the upcoming Budget as it looks to boost demand, consulting firm PwC India said on Thursday. Addressing a pre-Budget session, Pwc India senior tax partner Rahul Garg said demand creation is particularly focussed on money being given or left in the hands of the individuals.
China and India evoked the highest levels of confidence among major economies at 45 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively. The US was at 36 per cent, Canada at 27 per cent, the UK at 26 per cent, Germany at 20 per cent, France 18 per cent, and Japan having the least optimistic CEOs with only 11 per cent very confident of growing revenues in 2020.
DiPiazza's visit coincides with Price Waterhouse suspending two of its partners -- S Goplakrishnan and Srinivas Talluri -- who worked on the accounts of scam-hit Satyam Computer Services and were arrested last week.
The drying up of funds for a number of start-ups is affecting the firms' unicorn status across the globe. The past six months have seen the valuations of 147 unicorns drop, of which 71 were from the US and 29 from China, according to the latest Hurun Global Unicorn Index 2022. Eighty-one unicorns from across the globe saw their valuations drop below $1 billion-the threshold for a start-up to be labelled unicorn-from last year.
Indian startups received a record funding of $10.9 billion across 347 deals in the third quarter of 2021, according to a PwC India report. This is twice the amount of funding received in Q3 of the calendar year 2020 and an approximate increase of 41 per cent compared to the second quarter of 2021. An increase in funding activity was witnessed across all sectors in terms of value and volume.
L&T Housing Finance on Thursday announced selling L&T Investment Management (LTIM) to HSBC Asset Management (India) at $425 million. LTIM is the investment manager of the mutual fund business of L&T. The divestment of the mutual fund business is in line with the strategic objective of L&T Finance Holdings of unlocking value from its subsidiaries to strengthen its balance sheet, it stated in a press release. The data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) shows L&T Mutual Fund (MF) has average assets under management (AAUM) worth Rs 78,273.80 crore, while HSBC MF has AAUM of Rs 11,314.32 crore as in the July-September quarter.
However, a bench comprising Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justice Deepak Verma permitted Gopalkrishnan, then working as a partner of the global accounting firm, to renew his bail application over delay by probe agency CBI in filing the third chargesheet. Following it, the court permitted Subramani Gopalkrishnan's to withdraw his bail petition.
Despite several hurdles still to be crossed over for the ambitious expansion of nuclear power production in India, N-power is inevitable for the country's growth as well as to save future generation from inflation, a top executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers said on Thursday.
A local court in Hyderabad dismissed the bail petitions of S Gopalakrishnan and Talluri Srinivas, former partners of auditing firm Price Waterhouse, who are in judicial remand in the Rs 7,800-crore Satyam fraud case.
Indian rupee, which earlier this week touched an all-time low, is likely to remain under pressure and may test new levels as a fallout of the US Federal Reserve indicating more interest rate hikes, experts said. The aggressive rate hikes will dampen demand and increase the possibility of a recession in the US. This could accelerate the pace of capital outflows, weaken the rupee and raise the threat of imported inflation.
It is quite a shock that that company management, mainly disgraced chairman B Ramalinga Raju, kept everyone -- seemingly --in the dark for a decade.
Bangalore, the country's IT capital, is ranked No.1 on development prospects and 4th on investment prospects among Asia-Pacific (Apac) cities in 2009 from 13th poistion in 2008, according to the Emerging Trends in Real Estate Asia Pacific 2009 Report, which collated responses from participants across Asia-Pacific.
PwC wants to know what will happen when a company with substantial reserves is merged into a new concern and the resultant entity is converted into a limited liability partnership.
A day after getting permission to raise its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) user base to 100 million, WhatsApp on Thursday said it has plans to make significant investments in 'payments on WhatsApp' across India, including India-first features and driving adoption. The company, however, did not share details of its plans. The Meta-owned messaging app got its first greenlight for its payments service from the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) in November 2020 with a cap of 20 million users. A year later, in November 2021, the limit was raised to 40 million users.
With Bharatpe's co-founder Ashneer Grover launching an offensive against the firm's investors after facing a probe over alleged fraud, abrasive behaviour and corporate governance issues, the company on Friday said questioning the integrity of board members and misrepresentation of facts is painful. "The (company) board in all its actions has followed due process in the best interest of the company. We would urge that the confidentiality and integrity of the governance review and board meetings is maintained by all," BharatPe said in a statement. The statement followed Grover, who was sent on a three-month leave following allegations of using abusive language against Kotak Mahindra Bank staff and for fraudulent practices, reportedly saying he was "arm-twisted" by the company's investors into going on leave and that he had lost confidence in CEO Sameer Suhail.
Sumit Makhija, associate director, PwC said, "We have seen that frauds are happening in three main areas asset misappropriation by employees, financial mismanagement and corruption and bribery."
In connection with the multi-billion dollar Satyam scam, the US auditing watchdog has barred from public practice two Indian auditors associated with the IT firm's former auditor PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Setting aside the ban on PwC, which is one of the Big Four global accounting firms, SAT said only the national auditors watchdog ICAI (Institute of Chartered Accountants of India) can take any action against its members and fraud cannot be proved on the basis of negligence in auditing.
India's big four audit firms are PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young, while ICAI is the apex regulator of the profession of chartered accountants.
The Central Bureau of India on Monday opposed the bail plea of Price Waterhouse auditor Srinivas Talluri who was arrested in Satyam fraud case for allegedly conniving with its founder B Ramalinga Raju and other aides.
India's rupee is likely to remain under pressure due to high prices of crude oil and other commodities, and may stabilise at around 79-80 against the US dollar in the near term, say experts amid limited headroom available with the Reserve Bank to check the weakening of the domestic currency. The currency has slumped over 5 per cent this year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent international crude oil prices soaring to a decade high. On Monday, rupee ended at a fresh all-time low of 78.34 (provisional) against the US dollar.
PricewaterhouseCoopers India campaigns to appear responsible as it distances itself from the mess surrounding former client Satyam
Indian vice-captain Rahul Dravid led the Test batting honours for the second straight week.
A week after B Ramalinga Raju, the promoter of Satyam Computer Services, confessed to manipulating the accounts for several years, Price Waterhouse, external auditors of the Hyderabad-based software services firm, said its audit report should not be relied upon.
Chartered accountants body ICAI on Saturday served a showcause notice on auditor PriceWaterhouse and asked it to submit balance sheets of Satyam Computer audited by it in the last five years.
Special audit report conducted by the PricewaterhouseCoopers on Multi Commodity Exchange has met with another opposition. Earlier FTIL, the promoter of MCX had opposed its contents and now Venkat Chary who is FTIL's non-executive chairman has sent a notice to PwC. PwC report submitted to the FMC in last April mentioned the names of Key Management Personnel of MCX and the name of Venkat Chary was mentioned in that list. Chary was Chairman, MCX, during that period. Chary who had in past also served as Chairman of FMC objected to the PwC mentioning his name as the key management personal of MCX. He wrote to the audit firm saying that he was FMC-nominated Non-executive Independent Director and Chairman on the Board of Directors of MCX till July 13 when he resigned following revised FMC guidelines which laid down 70 years as the maximum age for Chairman/Director. Chary sighted provisions of Companies act and Section 2(51) of the Companies Act, which defines " key managerial personnel" in relation to a company include CEO or MD, whole time director, CFO, company secretary and other officer as prescribed. "As non-executive independent director and Chairman nominated/approved by the FMC, I did not fall within any of the above categories," said Chary and hence blamed PWC for not showing due diligence in your special Report to the FMC. Chary has sent a notice to PWC asking it to take immediate steps to rectify this error. Since PwC Report was placed in the public domain, "it has caused serious damages to my reputation as a practising Advocate of the Bombay High Court." Chary has asked PWC if remedial action are not taken he will report the case to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India for professional misconduct under the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949, by showing gross negligence in the in professional duties. Chary has said, "I also intend to resort to the civil and criminal courts for damages/action against PWC." When contacted PwC spokesperson said that, "Our work has been executed to the expected professional standards and we stand by the content of our report submitted to the Forward Markets Commission". Chary is not the first to oppose PWC, FTIL it self had said the report was prepared without giving them chance to respond and have not accepted contents. Recently, Riddhi Soddhi Bullion, had sent a legal notice for mentioning its name as 'indulging in wash trades on MCX.' The leading bullion trader had claimed damages in their defamation suit.