According to persons familiar with the situation, Vedanta Ltd. may lose its third chief financial officer in as many years as the mining company under the ownership of billionaire Anil Agarwal embarks on an extensive business restructure.
According to people who want to remain anonymous because the material is private, Sonal Shrivastava, who started working for the company in June, told Agarwal about her plan to quit last month. In an attempt to replace her, Anil Agarwal is speaking with finance experts who have worked with the organisation in the past; they stated that a decision might come as soon as this week.
Agarwal’s problems would worsen with Shrivastava’s exit because his holding firm, Vedanta Resources Ltd., has $3 billion in bond repayments to make over the next two years. Bondholders have been interacting with the group over a possible reorganisation of arrangements for the impending maturities. If her departure is accepted, it will come after that of Ajay Goel, who resigned earlier this year, and G. R. Arun Kumar, who departed in 2021 following Agarwal’s abortive bid to take the Mumbai-listed business private.
A request for response from a Vedanta representative was not answered. A group spokesman reached out to Shrivastava for comment but received no response.
Vedanta Ltd. gave its approval last month to divide into six public businesses. Agarwal anticipates that this action will increase the valuation of the company’s constituent parts and draw investors directly to important businesses. Additionally, the reorganisation would facilitate the sale of certain assets to lower the parent company’s debt, something the billionaire has long shunned.
Through a string of audacious acquisitions, Agarwal—who took over his father’s company in the 1970s, producing aluminium conductors—grew Vedanta Ltd. into a conglomerate focused on natural resources. Nevertheless, the billionaire was compelled to sell a portion of the firm and reevaluate the group’s corporate structure in order to raise additional money due to the holding company’s debt repayment requirements and ambitions to venture into other industries, like semiconductor production.
Earlier this month, experts warned that Vedanta Ltd.’s plan to demerge its businesses might take longer than expected due to lender scrutiny and the complexity of the proposed value-unlocking plan, which calls for listing each revenue stream for the resource conglomerate separately.
