Pitroda, Kelkar get seats on Jet board

High profile appointments come 2-months before the IPO.

Less than two months before filing its prospectus for an initial public offer of its shares, Jet Airways inducted two high-profile individuals into its board as directors: Satyan Gangaram Pitroda and Vijay Laxman Kelkar.

Pitroda, a member of the National Advisory Council, headed by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, was appointed director on December 24, 2004. Pitroda was the first chairman of the Telecom Commission, when the Rajiv Gandhi government created it in the late 1980s.

Kelkar was appointed director on the board of Jet Airways about a month earlier on November 18. Kelkar, a former finance secretary, had completed his tenure as adviser to the finance minister a few months before he accepted the board position.

Earlier in the year, on March 29, the Jet Airways board had another induction. PRS Oberoi, chairman and chief executive of EIH Limited, which runs the Oberoi group of hotels, joined the Jet board as a director. All these appointments are for one year till the company's next annual general meeting.

Apart from Naresh Goyal, the chairman, and Saroj K Datta, who is also an executive director, Jet Airways has many other interesting members on its board: Ali Ghandour, a Jordanian national and a former chairman of the Royal Jordanian Airlines, Victoriano P Dungca, an American national who retired as the executive vice-president of Philippine Airlines, Charles Arthur Adams, an American national who retired from UPS as its Asia-Pacific president and Javed Akhtar, a well-known poet and lyricist.