Rajesh Khanna, former managing director with Warburg Pincus, who quit the PE firm to float his own fund, has resigned from the board of Moser Baer India, a manufacturer of optical storage devices. He was serving as a non-executive director. His departure comes within a month of Warburg Pincus selling bulk of its 33.55 per cent stake in the listed optical device maker, with a huge loss.
Warburg Pincus had originally invested in the company way back in 2000 and pumped in more capital in 2002 and 2004. It is estimated to have bet around $220 million in total, making Moser Baer one of the biggest PE-funded public listed companies in the country.
After moving out from Warburg Pincus, Khanna set up Arka capital in partnership with Rohit Kapur, formerly head of KPMG Corporate Finance and Cyrus Driver, former India head of Helix Investments. Arka Capital had last year decided to cease operations within a year of hitting the road to raise around $400 million in maiden fund. This was attributed to a poor fund raising climate.
Since then Driver, one of the top team members, has moved on to join Partners Group, a Switzerland-based private market investment manager with $33 billion under management.
Founded in 1983, Moser Baer India Ltd offers optical storage media products including recordable compact discs, rewritable compact discs, recordable digital versatile discs (DVD), rewritable DVD’s and blue laser discs. The company is deep into losses.
Moser Baer scrip rose 2.6 per cent to close at Rs 9.3 a share on the BSE on Monday. It hit its 52 week low of Rs 8.9 a share last week.