Six Top Uti Officials Retire

Six senior officials of the Unit Trust of India (UTI) including two of its executive directors today called it a day following the paring of retirement age from 60 to 58 years. Among those who stepped down include executive directors K G Vassal and Brij Gopal Daga and other senior officials including A G Joshi, P C Gupta, S S Ratra, T K Das and R H Thatte. All these officials were served retirement notices last fortnight.

With these changes, two executive directors (EDs) DSR Murthy and B S Pandit will now share the major portion of the burden, till the time existing vacancies are filled in. In fact, both these executives have been loaded with handling almost every aspect pertaining to the day-to-day work of fund management. Currently, UTI has a fund size is about Rs 49,000 crore spread across dozens of schemes with different objectives.

DSR Murthy, one of the two existing executive directors, is now in charge of the department of investments (primary markets) in equity and debt. This involves handling assets worth about Rs 5,000 crore. In addition, Murthy is in charge of the department of funds management (equity schemes). In that capacity, he heads all fund managers. This job involves handling over Rs 20,000 crore of investors' funds. He is also in charge of international finance and ventures, in addition to his existing responsibilities of fund accounting. UTI has over Rs 600 crore assets in venture funds. The net asset value (NAV) of these funds are not known publicly as these funds are privately placed with large institutions, banks and insurance firms.

Murthy was made in charge of the department of market operations following the arrest of M M Kapur last month in Cyberspace private placement deal. The department of market operations has an annual turnover of about Rs 20,000 crore in equities. "This alone requires at least two or three individuals to handle such large volumes," senior officials say.

B S Pandit, in addition to his existing responsibilities, is now also head of the department of funds management (debt schemes and US-64) and money market operations, which account for an annual turnover of over Rs 30,000 crore. Apart from this, Pandit also heads the information technology department at UTI.