ICICI Bank Says CEO Chanda Kochhar Is On Annual Leave

ICICI Bank Ltd. denied that it has asked Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Chanda Kochhar to go on leave after the private lender decided to conduct an independent enquiry into an anonymous whistleblower’s complaint about alleged impropriety by her.

“She is on her annual leave, which was planned in advance,” the bank said in an exchange filing. ICICI Bank also denied having appointed any panel to find her successor as claimed by media reports.

The lender, however, is not aware of the duration of Kochhar’s leave, a bank official told BloombergQuint.

The whistleblower’s complaint is in addition to a 2016 letter by investor Arvind Gupta, who had alleged that loans to Videocon Group pointed to Kochhar’s conflict of interest. ICICI Bank did not give details of the latest complaint in its exchange statement.

Earlier this year, the lender’s board had said that it did not find anything wrong with Kochhar’s conduct. While she had been part of the committee which approved the loans to the Videocon Group, the loan itself was sanctioned by a consortium which included other banks, it said.