Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will address a press conference on an important economic issue at 4:30 pm on January 18. “FM will address press conference today on an important economic issue, 18th January at 4:30 pm,” the Centre’s advisory read.
Sitharaman will address the press conference along with Minister of State for Corporate Affairs Inderjit S Rao. The FM is likely to talk about the Devas-Antrix issue, following the Supreme Court judgment.
The Supreme Court was responding to a plea filed by Devas Multimedia and its shareholder Devas Employees Mauritius Pvt Ltd against an NCLT order to wind up the company. The Bengaluru-based company has been engaged in a decade-long legal tussle with ISRO’s commercial arm Antrix.
Antrix had moved the NCLT for liquidation of Devas on allegations of fraud. The NCLT had ruled in favour of Antrix, following which Devas moved the Supreme Court. The NCLT order stated that Devas Multimedia was incorporated with a motive to collude and connive with the then Antrix officials to get bandwidth from it by entering into an agreement in 2005, which was subsequently cancelled by the government.
In its judgement on Monday, the apex court said that “it is a case of fraud of a huge magnitude which cannot be brushed under the carpet”. “If the seeds of the commercial relationship between Antrix and Devas were a product of fraud perpetrated by Devas, every part of the plant that grew out of those seeds, such as the Agreement, the disputes, arbitral awards, etc., are all infected with the poison of fraud,” the top court further noted.
Notably, the Union Budget 2022-23 is about to be tabled in both the houses of the Parliament on February 1. Given the coronavirus crisis, Budget 2021-22 focused on ramping up economic recovery, providing stimulus packages across sectors under the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, bolstering the manufacturing of coronavirus vaccines and rolling out the PLI scheme for sectors like agriculture, forestry and fishing, industry and services among others. This year also observers and analysts expect the government to focus on reducing the deficit levels, speed up the divestment of PSUs, focus on job creation, bring GST rates on automobiles down, hike agri-credit target to Rs 18 lakh crore, increased focus on R&D among others. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has recommended that the government should adhere to its fiscal target of 6.8 percent of GDP and reduce the deficit to 4.5 percent by 2025-26. The industry body also suggested that the government should hasten the divestment process of PSUs like LIC, BPCL and Shipping Corporation of India and utilising the proceeds generated for creating social and physical infrastructure in urban and rural areas. “The government may announce asset monetisation of public sector undertakings under National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP). It can also monetisae the housing and commercial real estate it owns by floating REITs. We may see announcements related to higher capital allocation towards rail infrastructure and express highways to reduce logistics and time, which will improve productivity and economy,” head of research at Ventura Securities Vinit Bolinjkar told Business Today.