The company management remained tight-lipped about the resignations but indicated nothing unusual in these movements.
The Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta’s oil and gas division Cairn has seen three high-profile exits in the past three months. Two of them, chief executive Sudhir Mathur and chief financial officer Pankaj Kalra resigned last week.
According to sources privy to the development, the company’s chief internal audit and risk assurance director, Arup Chakraborty, left three months ago. Mathur’s exit is crucial as he would be the fourth CEO to leave the company since Vedanta completed the acquisition in late 2011. Ajay Dixit, who was CEO of Vedanta’s aluminum and power divisions, took charge of the oil and gas division as interim CEO after Mathur’s exit.
The other three CEOs who left the company after the Vedanta acquisition were Rahul Dhir in August 2012, P Elango (interim CEO) in May 2014, and Mayank Ashar in June 2016.
The company management remained tight-lipped about the resignations but indicated nothing unusual in these movements. “Such movements are part of a natural evolution in any organization and are in line with career aspirations and personal priorities of individuals,” a company spokesperson said in response to emailed questions. Mathur did not respond to queries from Business Standard.
Some industry veterans, however, said that such exits happen only in case of serious differences between the owners and the top management. The spokesperson said, “Having a strong and healthy leadership pipeline is the key to a high-growth organization like ours. We want to emphasize that these movements are unconnected and have been spread over time.” The exits come when Vedanta plans to invest around Rs 12,000 crore in its Barmer asset to augment production.
Vedanta recently won the maximum blocks in the first round of oil and gas auctions under the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) and was expecting to produce the first oil from these blocks by 2022. Vedanta received 41 blocks during the round, while the remaining was shared between Oil India, GAIL (India), Hindustan Oil Exploration Company (HOEC), and Bharat PetroResources.
Though Vedanta Resources announced the acquisition of 58.8 percent of Cairn India from Cairn Energy for $8.67 billion in August 2010, the acquisition was completed in December 2011.
In April 2017, Agarwal completed the merger of Cairn India with Vedanta, following which the former was delisted from the BSE.
