Rana Kapoor's man Friday Rajat Monga quits Yes Bank

Mumbai: Rajat Monga, the senior group president and former chief financial officer at the troubled lender Yes Bank, has quit, chief executive Ravneet Gill said on Thursday. The announcement came during a conference call with investors and analysts following a heavy plunge in the bank's share price over the past few sessions.

The bank scrip had dipped to historic lows and lost 22 per cent of its value just on Tuesday to close at a low Rs 32, down from a high of Rs 404 in August 2018 when RBI asked Rana Kapoor to leave the bank. Gill's comments before the markets opened lifted the stock, though, rallying over 24 per cent on the BSE, whose benchmark was down around 0.3 per cent.

Gill made the announcement in response to a query on why Monga, the long-time No 2 at the bank since the days when it was headed by the expelled promoter-chief executive Rana Kapoor, was missing from the concall.

"Rajat has decided to move on. For the past two years he has been carrying a lot of load and needed some time off so has decided to leave," Gill said.

Gill, who replaced Kapoor in March following the latter's term being cut short by the RBI over governance issues and under-reporting of bad loans, said the possibility of Monga taking a sabbatical was also discussed but he decided to move on. "He just felt that he was at that stage of his life and career where he needed to step back, reassess his future course personally and professionally," Gill said. The disclosure of the resignation comes at a time when the Kapoor family's holding in the bank has come to very low levels under 2 per cent from a high of a little over 13 per cent in August 2018, following the sale of 3.92 per cent holding by an asset manager with whom the holding was pledged

as a security.