Soon after the appointment as NFL director of S Kabila, joint secretary and financial advisor, department of fertilisers, the company's Panipat unit general manager Avinash Chandra Saini has been made director (technical). Saini took charge last Friday, an NFL release said here yesterday.
The company's acting chairman Thomas Abraham earlier said IDBI had released a tranche of Rs 50 crore to the corporation early this month and he expected a bigger tranche within a fortnight. NFL had taken an advance of Rs 280 crore before the recent disbursal of loan installment as part of a Rs 600-crore loan for the modernisation of its Vijaypur project.
The continuation of disbursal ran into troubled water with the unearthing of the scam.
NFL now moving towards cancelling the two lakh tonne urea import deal from the Turkish company Karsan and proceeding for arbitration to recover the Rs 133-crore advance paid to the contracting party last year. The public sector undertaking also recorded a profit of about Rs 145 crore in 1995-96.
In the meanwhile, the government has also advertised for the appointment of a regular chairman and managing director of the corporation. Thomas, who is chief executive of another profit making PSU, Fertiliser & Chemicals Travancore Ltd (FACT), was given temporary charge of NFL for three months.
Thomas had succeeded AV Singh, chief executive of the sick Hindustan Fertiliser Corporation, who took the reins of the troubled NFL after Ramakrishna was suspended in the wake of scam.
The corporation's troubles began when suppliers, including the Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL) refused to extend credit to the cash starved corporation following the import imbroglio and IDBI holding back further disbursal of the loan.
NFL'S name did not figure in the list of canalisers for urea import as the government allocated ad-hoc import quota for October 1996 to three trading houses