Buybacks going out of vogue?

Shares of Reliance Industries (RIL), earlier this month, dipped below its buyback price of Rs 870 per share, raising the debate once again whether share buybacks actually add value. RIL's Rs 10,440-crore worth buyback programme, the country's largest ever, didn't prove to be much useful. Its shares are down 20 per cent from this year's peak in May despite the benchmark indices climbing 10 per cent during this period. Blame it on the instrument's ineffectiveness or the stock market rally, but the fact is that buybacks this year have been only a fraction of 2013.

Samie Modak

Missing companies' list goes missing
In 2013, the government's Co-ordination and Monitoring Committee (CMC) had declared 87 vanishing companies, with a promise to add another 500 new companies to the list. However, though 2014 is coming to a close, there has been no update from the committee. In fact, even the minutes of their annual meeting have not been updated. The number of the vanishing companies, as estimated by a Business Standard analysis, has been pegged at 700 with an estimated market value of over Rs 29,000 crore.

Sachin Mampatta

Satyam saga continues for investors
Investors in the erstwhile Satyam Computers continue to remember those dreary days of January 2009, when promoter B Ramalinga Raju (pictured) wrote a letter that he had "cooked the company's books". A leading fund manager candidly confesses that he went against the fund house's decision to buy the company's stock and bought it in his personal account in 1998. And when the stock fell, the fund house's managers were rejoicing for making the great call while he bled. The good part: He still holds on to the company's shares and has more than recovered his losses. Satyam's stock price fell from a high of Rs 544 in May 2008 to Rs 20.3 in January 2009. The merger between Tech Mahindra and Satyam took place at a swap ratio of 1:8.5.

Joydeep Ghosh