NEW DELHI: New York-based Interups Inc has withdrawn from the Air India bidding process. Tuesday was the last date for filing EOI physically by those who had submitted the same online by the deadline of December 14 and the retirement fund of NRIs did not do the same ostensibly due to a clause that could have led to a \u201cpotential legal disqualification\u201d.
\nInterups\u2019 expression of interest (EoI) submitted on December 14 had proposed 49% ownership for it and remaining 51% for the employees. However, a consortia of 209 AI employees led by the airline\u2019s director (commercial) Meenakshi Mallik have filed their own EoI.
\nInterups chairman Laxmi Prasad said a clause of the AI sale mandates that \u201cno two interested bidders either individually or as a member of consortium shall be entitled to take the benefit of financial strength of the same affiliate for the purpose of participating in the proposed transaction either directly or indirectly.\u201d
\nWith employees being a common affiliate \u2014 a formal consortia in the case of Mallik\u2019s EOI and a proposed one by Prasad \u2014 the Interups chairman says there could have been a \u201cpotential legal disqualification\u201d.
\n\u201cWe have not submitted our physical EoI for (this) reason but we are aligned with the employees and terms remain the same \u2014 we completely fund the transaction with employees gaining 51% and we retaining 49%,\u201d Laxmi Prasad told TOI, adding, \u201cInstead of filing, we have chosen to support the employees who already have filed their bid as we are offered an opinion that filing a separate bid with same affiliation may disqualify the interested bidder and this legal fallacy will leave only one potential bidder. Under no circumstances we would wish this happening.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW DELHI: New York-based Interups Inc has withdrawn from the Air India bidding process. Tuesday was the last date for filing EOI physically by those who had submitted the same online by the deadline of December 14 and the retirement fund of NRIs did not do the same ostensibly due to a clause that could have led to a \u201cpotential legal disqualification\u201d. Interups\u2019 expression of interest (EoI) submitted on December 14 had proposed 49% ownership for it and remaining 51% for the employees. However, a consortia of 209 AI employees led by the airline\u2019s director (commercial) Meenakshi Mallik have filed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,130,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-aviation-the-times-of-india","category-newspapers","category-the-times-of-india"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}