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Articles Published by Hemindra Hazari

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. R.C. Bhargava is the long-serving current chairman of Maruti Suzuki India, India’s largest automobile company. He was also an independent director of IL&FS, the failed infrastructure developer and non-bank finance company, from 1990 till 2018. At that point, the Indian government finally removed all the directors of...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. The sharp slowdown in the Indian economy and the wide publicity to the production cutbacks and layoffs in the automobile sector have cast the spotlight on the retail sector of banking. The business model of HDFC Bank, India’s largest bank by market capitalization, is firmly wrapped around...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. HDFC Bank’s low-cost liabilities strategy of focusing on huge numbers of new client acquisitions in the semi-urban and rural centres may be getting large numbers of new customers, but is not resulting in significant growth in current and savings account deposits (CASA). The pressure on CASA appears...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. The market has not been kind to Axis Bank after its 1QFY2020 results. The share price has fallen 7%, as compared with a fall in the NIFTY of only 2%.  While analysts have raised concerns on the elevated credit costs and high slippages to gross non-performing assets,...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Problem: You are a leading sell-side analyst. What do you do when confronted with valuable, authoritative, and hitherto confidential information about India’s leading banks? A. Highlight it. B. Analyse it and publish a research report on it. C. Pretend it doesn’t exist. The correct answer, of course, is C. Pink...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Recently, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was forced to disclose its confidential inspection reports, called Risk Assessment Reports (RARs), of the State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank for the years FY2013 to FY2015. Shockingly, among the four banks, HDFC Bank...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Under the threat of being pulled up for contempt of court by the Supreme Court of India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) finally disclosed the confidential inspection reports, called Risk Assessment Reports, of some banks requested under the Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005. The reports,...
Hemindra Hazari 9 July 2019 On 26 June 2019, confronted with a contempt petition filed in the Supreme Court of India by Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI) activist, Girish Mittal, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) finally disclosed the hitherto confidential annual inspection reports, called risk assessment reports (RARs),...
The appalling record of incompetence, and likely worse, by India’s credit rating agencies (CRAs) continues to lengthen. The latest instance is the double default of commercial debt obligations (on June 27 and July 1, 2019) by Cox and Kings, a tour and travels services company. In this case the...
The resignation of Viral Acharya, deputy governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) six months before his term was to end, was preceded by the resignation of Urjit Patel. Earlier, Raghuram Rajan failed to get a second term as RBI governor. However, these developments did not bring on the “wrath...