On Thursday, the company informed the NYSE that it had appointed ASA Associates LLP to audit their US consolidated financial statement for March 2022.
Delisting of shares will lead to a breach of covenant and trigger a technical default on the two offshore bonds- $ 350 due 2024 and $ 4141 due 2026 – raised by Azure, a renewable power producer in India.
S R Batliboi & Co resigned as auditors on July 10. In a letter to the company, it said it resigned because the auditors did not receive the required information to complete their audit work for March 31, 2022.
This includes ‘financial statements, US annual filing, associated books and records, and conclusions and representations on the impact of the whistleblower complaints.’ It was, thus, not possible for them to complete the audit of the financial statements within the timeline expected by the company, EY said
MSKA & Associate, an affiliate of BDO International, is appointed as statutory auditors for Azure’s subsidiary company Azure Power India Pvt Ltd. They will replace S R Batliboi & Co.In a statement to the exchange, the company said it would take 14 weeks to complete the audit for fiscal year 2022 of the group and the subsidiaries. It added that although the exchange has indicated a suspension of trading and delisting around the July 15 deadline, it would appeal any such delisting decision by NYSE.The offshore bondholders of CDPQ and the Canadian pension fund Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMER) backed Azure have appointed Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld as their advisor over concerns of technical default triggered by the delisting of stock, as reported by ET on July 6.
The company said that if shares are delisting, it will make ‘every reasonable effort to maintain a trading alternative for its shareholders’. Initially, the company expects that its shares will be available to trade on the over-the-counter “expert” market, where quotations will be directly available to broker-dealers and professional investors but not to retail investors, the statement said.
