The 49 players would be allowed to submit “resolution plan(s) for any/all such Clusters under Option II,” according to FRL’s Resolution Professional.
Up to 49 parties have expressed interest in buying the assets of the insolvent Future Retail, which is currently going through an insolvency resolution process, including Reliance Retail, Jindal Power Ltd., and the Adani Group.
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After the Future Retail lenders decided to solicit new bids after segmenting FRL’s assets into clusters, Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd., the holding company for RIL’s retail operations, and April Moon Retail Private Ltd., a partnership between Adani Airport Holdings and the Flemingo Group, have once more submitted their EOIs.
The 49 players would be allowed to submit “resolution plan(s) for any or all such clusters under Option II,” according to an update from FRL’s Resolution Professional.
Century Copper Corp., Greentech Worldwide, Harsha Vardhan Reddy, J. C. Flowers Asset Reconstruction Pvt Ltd, Pinnacle Air Pvt Ltd, Universal Associates, and WHSmith Travel Ltd are a few of the other participants who have submitted expressions of interest (EoI).
Future Retail’s creditors issued a new request for expressions of interest on March 23, 2023, allowing potential buyers to submit bids for the insolvent company “as a going concern, an individual cluster, or a combination of clusters of its assets,” as it had been without a resolution plan for more than four months.
It had previously received an EOI and finalised 11 potential bidders, including Reliance and April Moon Retail, but despite two extensions to the submission deadline, it was unable to obtain a resolution plan.
The deadline for submitting the EoI, which had two options, was April 7, 2023, was provided by the Committee of Creditors.
The prospective resolution applicant (PRA) could make a bid for Future Retail as a whole, including its ownership stakes in its subsidiaries, in the first option.
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The business of Future Retail has been divided into five clusters under the second option, and PRAs are free to submit bids for “any single cluster or any combination of clusters.”
After FRL stopped making loan payments, its lender, the Bank of India, started CIRP against it. On October 4, 2022, prospective bidders were invited to submit expressions of interest in accordance with the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code.
Later, it was reissued, the deadline for submitting the Resolution Plan was extended, and on November 15, 2022, a final list of 15 PRAs was released.
On March 15, FRL announced that Kishore Biyani had withdrew his resignation from the FRL board, nearly one and a half months after he had submitted it.
This happened after the RP voiced concerns about the resignation letter’s content and asked Biyani to retract it.
Under brands like Big Bazaar, Easyday, and Foodhall, FRL operated a variety of retail formats in the hypermarket supermarket and home segments. At its height, FRL had over 1,500 locations operating in almost 430 cities.
It was one of 19 Future Group companies that were to be transferred to Reliance Retail as part of a deal worth Rs 24,713 crores that was announced in August 2020. These businesses operate in the retail, wholesale, logistic, and warehousing sectors.
However, amid a legal challenge by Amazon, lenders had rejected Reliance’s acquisition of the 19 Future Group companies, including FRL. The stock market watchdog SEBI ordered a forensic audit of FRL’s financial statements for the fiscal years 2019–20, 2020–21, and 2021–22 in August of last year.
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