Ing Barings Offers 8-Mth Salary As Severance Pay

ING Baring Securities India Ltd, the broking arm of ING Barings which shut down its equities, debt, securities trading and research operations in India last week, has offered its employees a severance package of 8 months salary.

Though employees are yet to receive an official notification, they have been informally told about their compensation package.

For the dealers and analysts at the firm, this works out to an amount of nearly Rs 8-9 lakh. The employees at a lower grade have been offered a 12 month salary package. In addition, for each year that an employee has served, he will receive a take-home salary of two months as a `royalty.

 

This apart, the employees have been allowed to use office infrastructure for a period of one month while scouting for better offers. Last week, 23 employees at the Mumbai office of ING Baring Securities were retrenched after the parent organisation decided to suspend their India operations as it was no longer found to be viable.

Market sources have described the compensation package as one of the most humane in the industry. The package is far superior to any of the severance packets provided by other foreign brokerages/ investment banks which have wound up their Indian operations.

lBZW, the investment banking arm of Barclays Bank, which shut down its equities operations in India, had offered 3 months notice pay, three months redundancy pay and one month pay for every year of service. It had extended its office facilities for 3 months.

lDeutsche Morgan Grenfell (DMG) which moved out of equities trading globally, had offered three months notice pay while Natwest Markets had extended three months pay and a three months notice.

lPeregrines debt market team of about 13 members, who were retrenched in early November were given 1 month notice pay and one month salary for every year of service. The rest of the Peregrine staff have been retained, with news on the acceptance of the bid from new buyers for Peregrines India operations awaited.

ING Baring Securities (India) had commenced India operations in February 1996. It had created a flutter in capital markets when it bought a BSE card for a whopping Rs 4.12 crore in November 1995. However, the company posted a net loss of Rs 3.31 crore at the end of December 1996.