The Committee of Creditors (CoC), tasked with finding buyers for the Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Communications (RCom), has approved a resolution plan of all the group companies with an “absolute majority”.
“The approvals for all the group companies —– RCom, Reliance Telecom Ltd (RTL) and Reliance Infratel Ltd (RITL) —- came in with a 100 per cent majority as against the mandatory 66 per cent as the voting ended today. The Resolution Professional will file the results of voting with the National Company Law Tribunal tomorrow,” a source close to the development told BusinessLine .
The voting results have to be tabled by March 4, the deadline set earlier by NCLT, another source said.
The board of State Bank of India (SBI) — the lead lender to RCom — had earlier approved a resolution plan and has now voted in favour of the plan.
RCom was referred to NCLT in last May after an offer from the Mukesh Amabni-controlled Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio) for its assets was not approved by the creditors.
Highest bidders
RJio and securitisation firm UV Asset Reconstruction Co Ltd (UVARCL) were the highest bidders for RCom assets at the CoC meeting held on January 13, 2019. RJio had bid for about ₹4,700 crore for the tower and fibre assets held by RITL.
UVARCL had bid ₹14,000 crore for spectrum, real-estate assets and enterprise and data centre businesses held in by RCom and RTL.
A total of 38 lenders of RCom will recover about 70 per cent or ₹23,000 crore of their outstanding ₹33,000 crore of secured debt, while loans of Chinese lenders will fall by nearly 65 per cent or ₹8,000 crore to ₹4,000 crore from ₹12,000 crore, according to the resolution proposal.
In addition, the lenders will clawback the priority payments of ₹4,300 crore made to Chinese lenders (₹1,300 crore) and Indian lenders (₹3,000 crore).
Of the total 2,542 cases admitted under Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) since December 2016, only 156 plans have been approved, while 587 went to liquidation and 1,497 cases are still pending.