Mumbai:
Girish Radhakrishnan has,57, finally taken over as the Chairman and managing director (CMD) of Chennai based United India Insurance Company(UIC) on Monday.
Radhakrishnan, who was earlier CEO of London operations of the New India Assurance(NIA), will be retiring in June 2021.
With Radhajrishanan joining as the CMD of of UII, two of three posts of CMDs, for which interviews of 10 senior officials of PSU general insurance were conducted in May 2018, have got filled up and the post at NIA is still lying vacant.
Though, it was bing speculated that the government was keen to bring in a private sector professional to head the largest general insurer in the country, sources point out that there might have been a change of mind again on the part of the government and the ministry of finance now wants NIA to be headed by a PSU general insurer.
“But whether it would shift AV Girija Kumar, CMD, OIC,the senior most CMD among the four PSU general insurance companies to NIA or it would select one of the nine candidates who had appeared for the post, is not yet known,’’ said sources.
The post of NIA CMD is lying vacant after G Srinivasan retired in July end. Two senior most directors of the company,Hemant G Rokde and C Narambunathan are now holding the `joint in charge', discharging the functions of CMD fhe company.They will complete their first three months on Oct 31 and would require extension with the approval of the Prime Minister's Office(PMO) to continue the existing arrangement.
Though ,the government had notified Radhakrishnan's appointment as the CMD of UII in Sept second week,he couldn’t take charge immediately as he couldn’t be relieved from the post because of the time taking UK’s regulatory clearance
NIA has already selected one of its deputy general managers, Neerja Kapoor, to succeed Radhakrishnan, but she is waiting for the regulatory clearance from the UK government to take charge,
Radhakrishnan, from the day one, will have the tough task of improving the performance of the UII which is also a merger candidate in the mega merger scheme of three PSU general insurers, as announced by the finance minister Arun Jaitly in his 2018-19 Budget speech, the other two being National Insurance Company(NIC) and OIC.
However, ministry of finance,putting the merger on the back burner, is now targeting to strengthen the performance of these companies, which are losing business and and market share apart from recordng higher underwriting losses, consistently in the recent times.
These companies don't have even the minimum solvency margin of 1.5 per cent .as mandated b the insurance regulator IRDAI and are curently are doing business with special forbearance of the from the regulator.
“They would be requiring capital and will have to find ways to raise them from sources other than their owner-government,'' said industry analysts.