The US-64 Controversy

DISTRUST IN TRUST

Unlike the usual practice for mutual funds, UTI never declared the NAV of US-64 - only the purchase and sale prices for the units were announced. Analysts remarked that the practise of not declaring US-64's NAV in the initial years was justified as the scheme was formulated to attract the small investors into capital markets. The declaration of NAV at that time would not have been advisable, as heavy stock market fluctuations resulting in low NAV figures would have discouraged the investors. This seemed to have led to a mistaken feeling that the UTI and US-64 were somehow immune to the volatility of the Sensex.

Following the heavy redemption wave, it soon became public knowledge that the erosion of US-64's reserves was gradual. Internal audit reports of SEBI regarding US-64 established that there were serious flaws in the management of funds.

Even a typical balanced fund (equal debt and equity) usually did not put more than 30% of its corpus into equity. A Business Today report claimed that eager to capitalise on the 1994 stock market boom, US-64 had recklessly increased its equity holdings. By the late 1990s the fund's portfolio comprised around 70% equity.

While the equity investments increased by 40%, UTI seemed to have ignored the risk factor involved with it. Most of the above investments fared very badly on the bourses, causing huge losses to US-64. The management failed to offload the equities when the market started declining. While the book value of US-64's equity portfolio went up from Rs 7,943 crore (June 1994) to Rs 13,627 (June 1998), the market value had actually declined in the same period from Rs 18,334 crore to Rs 10,029 crore. Analysts remarked that UTI had been pumping money into scrips whose market value kept falling. Raising further questions about the fund management practices was the fact that there were hardly any ‘growth scrips'from the IT and pharma sectors in the equity portfolio.

In spite of all this, UTI was able to declare dividends as it was paying them out of its yearly income, its reserves and by selling the stocks that had appreciated. This kept the problem under wraps till the reserves turned negative and UTI could no longer afford to keep the sale and purchase prices artificially inflated.

Following the public outrage against the whole issue, UTI in collaboration with the government of India began the task of controlling the damage to US-64's image.

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