Arvindar Singh Sahney will be new chairman of Indian Oil Corporation

Arvindar Singh Sahney was in August selected to be the company's director for business development but has now been appointed as the chairman of the firm

Arvindar Singh Sahney will be the new chairman of Indian Oil Corporation, the nation's largest oil firm, according to an order issued by the petroleum ministry on Wednesday.

Sahney, 54, is currently Executive Director (Business Development - Petrochemicals), Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOC).

He was in August selected to be the company's director for business development but has now been appointed as the chairman of the firm.

"The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved the proposal of this ministry for appointment of Shri Arvindar Singh Sahney, Executive Director, IOC to the post of Chairman, IOC, for a period of five years with effect from the date of his assumption of charge of the post, or till the date of his superannuation, or until further order, whichever is the earliest," the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas said in an order.

The post of chairman IOC fell vacant after Shrikant Madhav Vaidya completed his extended tenure on August 31, 2024. Currently, Satish Kumar Vaduguri (Director, Marketing, IOC), is holding the additional charge of chairman of the Fortune 500 company.

Sahney will be the second person after B Ashok to be elevated to the top job of the company without a board experience. Ashok too was Executive Director (Retail) when in July 2014 he was appointed IOC chairman.

A three-member search-cum-selection-committee in mid-August interviewed about a dozen candidates for the top job at IOC.

Later vigilance profiles of four internal candidates - Arvind Kumar (Director, Refinery, IOC), Sahney, Sanjay Parasher (ED, Marketing, IOC) and Saumitra Srivastava (ED, Marketing and head of Maharashtra region, IOC) - were sought.

After clearance by the anti-corruption watchdog CVC, Sahney's name was approved for the top job at IOC.

Sahney has been with the company for over three decades now. Schooled in Lucknow, he is a chemical engineer from Harcourt Butler Technical University, Kanpur.

He joined IOC in 1993 following a brief stint at Tata Chemicals. He was appointed executive director of the company in February 2022.

He was picked among a dozen candidates by the government headhunter Public Enterprise Selection Board (PESB) on August 20 for the job of Director (Business Development), IOC.

Prior to that on August 11, he was among the 11 candidates who were interviewed by a search-cum-selection committee for the top job at IOC. Those interviewed that day included GAIL chairman and managing director Sandeep Gupta (who previously was Director (Finance) at IOC), IOC Director (Marketing) Satish Kumar Vaduguri and IOC Director (Refineries) Arvind Kumar.

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) Director (marketing) Sukhmal Kumar Jain as well as company's director (refineries) S Khanna were also interviewed. Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) director (marketing) Amit Garg had also appeared.

The panel was tasked to look for a replacement for Shrikant Madhav Vaidya, whose one-year extension beyond his retirement age of 60 years ended on August 31.

The age eligibility cut off has been set at not more than 58 years for internal candidates and 57 years for outsiders with 60 years as the retirement age. But this was relaxable in the case of deserving candidates.

This discretion was used in the case of Gupta, who has less than two years before retirement in February 2026, and Satish Kumar Vaduguri, who had only 11 months of service left at the time of the interview.

Vaidya, who took over as the chairman of India's biggest oil company on July 1, 2020, was to retire on August 31, 2023, when he attained the superannuation age of 60 years. But he was in a rare move "re-employment on a contract basis" for one year "beyond the date of his superannuation i.e with effect from September 1, 2023, till August 31, 2024," according to an official order dated August 4, 2023.

Thereafter a three-member search-cum-selection committee was constituted to find who will head IOC after August 31, 2024. The panel is headed by the government headhunter Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB) chairperson and includes the oil secretary and former Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) chairman M K Surana as members.

IOC refines crude oil into products like petrol, diesel, liquid petroleum gas (LPG), and aviation turbine fuels. It also makes petrochemicals and retails CNG.

Besides being the backbone of Indian fuel supplies, IOC is pivoting India's energy transition -- the shift from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption -- including oil, natural gas, and coal, to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, as well as lithium-ion batteries.

IOC owns and operates 10 oil refineries with a combined capacity of 80.6 million tonnes, making up for almost a third of India's 251.2 million tonnes of refining capacity. It also owns 36,285 petrol pumps out of 86,855 pumps in the country. Besides, it owns half of the nation's 25,386 LPG distributors. It runs 131 out of 283 aviation fuel stations in the country.