Latest news with #IDFC
TimesLIVE
08-08-2025
- Business
- TimesLIVE
Ithala employees present memorandum of grievances
Workers at Ithala Development Finance Corporation (IDFC), represented by the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu), have raised red flags about management of the institution under the group CEO Pearl Bhengu. They cited concerns over the institution's performance, neglect of infrastructure and financial oversight. Union members marched to the IDFC offices in Durban on Thursday to express the concerns to board chairperson Mpumzi Pupuma and the KwaZulu-Natal department of economic development, tourism and environmental affairs. The union said the IDFC had not demonstrated any visible growth since Bhengu's appointment in 2018, but has seen steady deterioration of Ithala and the institution's broad development mandate. Nehawu said its main concern was around possible financial mismanagement and negligence in the institution, which they claim had resulted in significant revenue loss and reputational damage. One was the alarming decline in the performance and upkeep of Ithala's industrial estates. 'The estates, which were once key drivers of economic development and revenue generation, are in a state of disrepair and neglect. The deterioration of the assets represents a huge loss of potential income for the organisation and undermines the developmental mandate Ithala is expected to fulfil, particularly in empowering historically disadvantaged communities and supporting small businesses in KwaZulu-Natal.' This has contributed to the high vacancy rate at the institution's industrial estates, which stands at more than 40%. The union also highlighted the neglect of Ithala's property portfolio, stating some shopping centres under Ithala remain non-operational despite insurance payouts. 'Buildings and properties, many of which are strategically located, are either underutilised, mismanaged or abandoned. The failure to manage revenue-generating assets responsibly reflects not only poor leadership but also gross financial mismanagement. It raises serious questions about accountability, planning and the strategic direction of the entity.' The union also pointed to the departure of tenants such as Mensu, Defy and other significant businesses from IDFC-managed industrial estates as indicators of the decline. 'That is a direct result of deteriorating infrastructure, lack of strategic tenancy management and failure to create a conducive investment environment.' The union said it was also concerned about allegations its members had made about Bhengu and management, including: The failure to provide essential tools of trade to workers who carry out vital functions within the institution and an alleged display of arrogance and dismissiveness by some of management's representatives in the local labour forum. Favouritism in the appointment of personnel in critical positions by Bhengu and the human capital management unit, with allegations that since Bhengu's arrival at IDFC, there had been an 'a notable influx' of individuals previously associated with the South African Social Security Agency, the institution Bhengu came from. 'It is precisely because of this continued inaction and disregard that we are gathered here today to submit a memorandum of demands and to place on record, once again, the urgent need for decisive intervention and change at Ithala.' Its demands included: An independent forensic audit of appointments made under the tenure of the leadership. The immediate suspension of all questionable appointments pending a review. The establishment of an inclusive recruitment oversight committee to ensure future transparency, fairness and compliance with Ithala's HR policies. An immediate investigation into the issuance of purchase orders to tenants receiving rental concessions and the suspension of all self-maintenance arrangements until a transparent, fraud-proof verification system is put in place. Termination of any lease agreement where the primary occupant is found to be in breach of IDFC policy and strengthening of internal controls to prevent future policy violations related to the use of Ithala-owned properties. Nehawu gave the IDFC board and KwaZulu-Natal department of economic development, tourism and environmental affairs 14 days to respond to its grievances. 'There is a palpable and growing sense of institutional collapse and any further delays in addressing the issues will only accelerate the deterioration. 'We caution that inaction will carry grave consequences for your leadership and the of IDFC as a public entity entrusted with a developmental mandate,' the union said in its memorandum. It said issues raised were grave and systemic and demanded IDFC's immediate and undivided attention. The union refused to hand the memorandum to an IDFC representative, saying it wanted to submit it to Pupuma or any other member of the board. The memorandum was eventually received by Boyce Mntambo, director of eThekwini district operations for the KwaZulu-Natal department of economic development, tourism and environmental affairs.
Mint
30-07-2025
- Business
- Mint
5 best credit cards for senior citizens 2025: Compare top no-fee and low-fee options
Credit cards for senior citizens are becoming more common in India due to advancing banking products and, ultimately, financial inclusion. These cards, specifically designed with ease, security, and rewards in mind, can help seniors maintain their independence financially, get unique benefits, and manage emergency expenses effectively. Let's explore what it means for a senior citizen to have a credit card. Financial trends change after an individual retires. Despite fluctuating income, access to safe and convenient transactions is always a need. Credit cards allow senior citizens to access a safer way to pay for anything from telephonic doctor's appointments to electricity bills, vacations, necessities, as well as cashbacks, rewards and discounts that meet their needs. It is important to evaluate credit cards based on the features that most apply to seniors, before applying for a credit card: Minimal/no annual fee: Cards that do not charge an annual renewal fee or cost a very minimal amount can save you money over a long time. Cards that do not charge an annual renewal fee or cost a very minimal amount can save you money over a long time. Discounts on health care products: Some provide cashback for medical examinations and also for pharmacy expenses. Some provide cashback for medical examinations and also for pharmacy expenses. Airport lounge access: Lounge access provides some convenience and comfort for older travellers. Lounge access provides some convenience and comfort for older travellers. Waivers for fuel fees: This means something for those individuals who still drive/travel the roads. This means something for those individuals who still drive/travel the roads. Reward programs: Cards which provide cashback or points for our necessities, such as prescription drugs or groceries. Require OTP verification at all times for every online transaction. Check your statements often and report any peculiarities immediately. Never provide the CVV for your card or the card details. Credit cards Joining fees IDFC First Wow Credit Card Nil ICICI Bank Platinum Credit Card Nil Axis Bank My Zone Easy Credit Card ₹ 500 SBI Card Unnati Nil (first year) IDBI Imperium Platinum Credit Card ₹ 499 (Note: Please visit the bank's official website to learn more about the fees & charges of the credit card of your choice) 1. IDFC First Wow Credit Card: Excellent choice for seniors on fixed incomes because there are no annual or membership fees. Accepted by all RuPay network merchants, plus UPI-linked payments. 2. ICICI Bank Platinum Credit Card: No annual fee for basic usage, making it ideal for smart shoppers who use it infrequently. Earn one reward point for every ₹ 100 spent on grocery, utilities and other purchases. 1% waiver on fuel transaction fees at all petrol stations in India. 3. Axis Bank My Zone Easy Credit Card: Save up to 15% off at participating restaurants. Enabled tap-and-pay for secure, fast transaction payment. Get movie and lifestyle discounts. 4. SBI Card Unnati: Seniors can use it for free for the first four years. Earn one reward point for every ₹ 100 spent. Waive 1% for fuel purchases to assist your travel needs. 5. IDBI Imperium Platinum Credit Card: Low renewal and annual fees with appealing waiver clauses. Earn points on all purchases to redeem in various ways. Additional cards with specific restrictions can be issued to family member accounts. In conclusion, with options for day-to-day savings, travel and medical benefits, seniors can reap the benefits of plastic money without any hassles or concerns over money. As the financial world changes, older adults need to be able to use these products safely, intelligently and importantly, confidently. For all personal finance updates, visit here. Disclaimer: Mint has a tie-up with fin-techs for providing credit; you will need to share your information if you apply. These tie-ups do not influence our editorial content. This article only intends to educate and spread awareness about credit needs like loans, credit cards and credit score. Mint does not promote or encourage taking credit, as it comes with a set of risks such as high interest rates, hidden charges, etc. We advise investors to discuss with certified experts before taking any credit.
Time of India
28-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Nothing Phone 3 price drop alert: Get up to Rs. 20,000 discount on White, 256 GB storage
The Nothing Phone 3 has just hit the Indian market with a tempting up to ₹20,000 discount, catching the attention of smartphone enthusiasts. But while this price slash makes the Nothing Phone device significantly more affordable, there's a condition that buyers need to be aware of. This isn't a straightforward price drop — the offer is tied to a specific platform and comes with a catch that might not suit everyone. Still, for those willing to play by the rules, it presents one of the best opportunities to grab the Nothing Phone 3 at a considerably lower price. In this article, we break down the details of the deal, the specs of the phone, where and how to get the discount, and whether this is truly worth your money in 2025. Let's dive into everything you need to know before buying. Nothing Phone 3 specifications The Nothing Phone 3 features a 6.67-inch AMOLED display that supports HDR10+ and is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 7i. It features a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate and peak brightness of 4,500 nits. It comes equipped with a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, along with up to 16GB of RAM and storage of up to 512GB. The device comes with a 5,500 mAh battery and supports 65W charging. It features a 50MP main camera, a 50MP periscope camera with 3x optical zoom, and a 50MP ultrawide camera. Additionally, it features a 50MP front camera. Nothing Phone 3 price, discount, and offer At a price of Rs 79,999, the Nothing Phone 3 was introduced. There is also a bank discount of Rs 10,000 for customers who use credit cards from IDFC and ICICI. Moreover, customers can trade in their old device for an exchange bonus of Rs 10,000, which reduces the price to approximately Rs 59,999. Furthermore, the worth of the device you are exchanging will be subtracted (up to Rs 68,000). Customers have the choice of EMI options starting at Rs 4,445 monthly, including no-cost EMI alternatives. Buyers have the option to purchase an extended warranty or other add-ons for an additional cost.
The Diplomat
24-07-2025
- Business
- The Diplomat
US Foreign Aid With Chinese Characteristics
The dismantling of USAID is the culmination of a decade-long realignment of Western approaches to development, inspired by China's Belt and Road Initiative. The GSEZ Mineral Port in Gabon, one of the projects supported by public-private partnership via the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. As President Donald Trump takes a chainsaw to U.S. foreign aid programs, it would be easy to attribute such extreme measures to MAGA isolationism or DOGE zealotry. While anti-globalist and anti-government ideologies certainly played a role, the shift away from traditional foreign aid is not limited to the U.S. and does not represent a full-scale abandonment of development finance. Indeed, Trump's moves represent the culmination of a decade-long realignment of Western approaches to development, inspired by China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The retreat from traditional foreign assistance cuts across the Western world. By 2026, estimates hold that foreign aid budgets will have fallen by over one-quarter in Canada and Germany and by close to 40 percent in Britain, compared with 2023 levels. Overall, G-7 countries, which account for 75 percent of foreign assistance, spent 28 percent less in 2025 than in 2024. Yet even as Trump's Big Beautiful Bill cut foreign aid, it also provided new funding – a $3 billion revolving fund – for the International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC), which was created by the 2017 BUILD Act. The IDFC is up for renewal this year, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee has already voted in support of authorizing its operations for another seven years with a lending cap of $120 billion, double the initial level. The IDFC was intended as an answer to China's BRI, which represented an alternative to traditional Western approaches to aid. The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – a club of Western donor countries – defines Official Development Assistance (ODA) as concessional finance directed toward developmental projects in low- and middle-income countries. The DAC encourages transparency and discourages the tying of aid to purchases of goods and services from the donor country. Most DAC countries emphasize 'soft' aid, focused on health, education, and humanitarian assistance. ODA typically draws upon budgeted funds that must be renewed annually. Very little of Chinese development finance meets these criteria. Instead, China's development finance is commercial in orientation. Most loans are initiated by policy banks – the China Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank – that raise funds by issuing bonds to investors. Loans carry near-market interest rates and must be repaid in full. Much of Chinese development finance has been channeled through the BRI, which focuses on infrastructure construction. Loans through these policy banks and others have amounted to well over a trillion dollars over the past decade. Western countries have followed China's lead both in commercializing development finance and in driving more resources toward infrastructure development. The latter move has transpired under the guise of various initiatives: the BUILD Act (U.S.), Build Back Better World (U.S.), the Global Gateway initiative (European Union), the Blue Dot Network (U.S., Australia, Japan), the Quality Infrastructure Investment Initiative (Japan), and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (G-7). The competitive ambitions of the West have been limited by a paucity of available public funds, which makes it difficult to match the scale of China's BRI. This problem gave rise to efforts to leverage public money to mobilize private capital for development purposes through blended finance initiatives. At the multilateral level, a group of multilateral development banks issued a planning document titled 'From Billions to Trillions: Transforming Development Finance' in 2015. This paper outlined a vision for mobilizing private financial resources toward Global South infrastructure and other developmental needs. This was followed by the World Bank's 'Maximizing Finance for Development' initiative and the United Nation's 'Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance.' These projects and those discussed below constituted what Daniela Gabor characterized as a 'Wall Street Consensus.' Many types of infrastructure take the form of public (or semi-public) goods. Public goods, by their nature, are underproduced relative to their social utility because producers cannot exclude consumers from benefiting once the goods are produced. The Wall Street Consensus aims to make infrastructure projects 'bankable' or attractive to private investors by shifting the risk of unprofitability to the state. If successful, private money is pooled with public funding through blended financing models such as syndicated bond issues. In this 'development as derisking' model, private capital is 'escorted' into the process of financing infrastructure through the creation of new asset classes freed of investor risk. In 2018, the G-20 declared support for a Roadmap to Infrastructure as an Asset Class. Two types of risks must be minimized for private investors: regulatory risk and financial risk. Reducing regulatory risk includes lower environmental and safety standards, guaranteed grid access, legal protections against nationalization, and liability limits. Financial risk is managed through guaranteed toll revenues, preferential credit, loan guarantees, tax relief, or subsidies. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) or DAC donors help build state capacity in project identification and development, provide expertise in securitizing infrastructure assets for the market, and offer partial financing or loan guarantees. The necessity for subsidies and other forms of state support arises from the fact that more than half of infrastructure projects in emerging economies do not promise sufficient cash flow to attract private investors. Even projects with dedicated revenue streams often carry demand risks, meaning they turn unprofitable if demand for the service declines. Governments may be compelled to include contract provisions that promise to cover revenue shortfalls with public funds when demand falls below certain thresholds. Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, and Nicholas Jepson noted that what Gabor referred to as the 'derisking state' becomes both more dependent upon global finance and increasingly interventionist in shaping market outcomes. This contrasts with the Washington Consensus, which counseled state neutrality vis-à-vis the market, but also differs from the East Asian development model, where state intervention sought to shape the behavior of national capital rather than global capital. By relieving private investors of risk, states aim to amplify the capital that can be mobilized toward critical development needs beyond national savings or the resources of MDBs and bilateral donors. The trade-off is the acceptance of risk by the developing state, a danger highlighted when the COVID-19 pandemic and rising interest rates threatened the solvency of many highly indebted countries. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation fits this model. The BUILD Act described its purpose as to 'provide countries a robust alternative to state-directed investments by authoritarian governments and United States strategic competitors.' With a financing authority of $60 billion, the IDFC seeks to 'crowd-in' private capital with a flexible toolkit that includes nonconcessional loans, loan guarantees, export credits, political risk insurance, equity investments, and technical assistance. Largely due to IDFC activity, nonconcessional development finance flows jumped from 4 percent of overall U.S. aid spending in 2020 to 36 percent in 2021. Among the major projects funded by the IDFC are investments related to the Lobito Corridor in Southern Africa, which aims to create transportation links allowing Western firms to access critical minerals that are presently monopolized by China. Ironically, this growing Western emphasis on nonconcessional, commercialized development finance with an emphasis on infrastructure development comes at a time when China has scaled back the BRI (largely due to growing evidence that many recipient countries have exceeded their borrowing capacities) and begun allocating more resources to 'soft' aid through the Global Development Initiative. An obvious drawback of the blended finance model is that it diverts attention and resources from traditional concessional aid and the investment in health, education, and disaster assistance that remain essential. But even on its own terms, the effectiveness of the Wall Street Consensus remains in doubt. A 2020 report by the Center for Global Development concluded that the overall flow of blended finance had been disappointing and that the great bulk of MDB-mobilized private financing was directed to middle-income rather than low-income countries. A 2019 study by ODI Global reached similar conclusions. In low-income countries, on average, each $1 in public development financing mobilized only $0.37 in private finance. Blended finance was constrained by the low risk tolerance of both public and private actors in the face of environments hampered by poor governance and few profitable investment opportunities. Since most blended finance flowed to middle-income countries and to 'hard' sectors, such as transport and energy, as opposed to social sectors, the report suggested that the increased priority given such investments came at the expense of programs that more directly targeted poverty in low-income countries. Indeed, the proposed doubling in the funding cap for the IDFC cannot substitute for the human costs that follow from the cuts to U.S. Official Development Assistance, which one study suggests will lead to 14 million deaths over the next five years. Traditional aid may have drawbacks, whether evaluated as a tool of U.S. foreign policy or in terms of development effectiveness, but abandoning it in favor of the privatization of development finance is neither wise nor humane.
Hindustan Times
06-07-2025
- Hindustan Times
Faridabad man duped of ₹2.23-crore; one held
A 38-year-old Gujarat resident was arrested on Thursday for his alleged involvement in a ₹2.23-crore cyber fraud duping an octogenarian cardiac surgeon and his wife — residents of Faridabad Sector 39, police said on Saturday. Vijay Kumar Amrut Lal Thakkar, a resident of Gujarat's Deesa worked for a cyber fraud gang being run by Chinese nationals operating from Cambodia. (Archives) Vijay Kumar Amrut Lal Thakkar, a resident of Gujarat's Deesa worked for a cyber fraud gang being run by Chinese nationals operating from Cambodia. He was arrested from Deesa. Yashpal Yadav, public relations officer of Faridabad police, said Thakkar's prime role was to get mule accounts opened via various people across India and give its access to the gang members in Cambodia. He had got a current account opened on the basis of a shell company with IDFC bank in Solan, Himachal Pradesh through another accused Chaman Lal. Police said the suspect impersonating a Mumbai crime branch official had called the surgeon on WhatsApp on June 26, 2024 and threatened to arrest him on grounds that his accounts were used for money laundering. The conman also asked the doctor to share his bank statements on the pretext of investigation and then took bribes worth ₹2.23 crore in multiple transactions till July 3, 2024 crore, citing they will clear his name from the case. The victim had later got a cheating and impersonation case registered at Cybercrime police station (central) on July 10, 2024. Yadav said that out of the total duped money, ₹39 lakh was credited into the IDFC account. 'Rest was credited into two more current accounts opened fraudulently with private banks. These three mule accounts were accessed from Cambodia to further transact the couple's money into various accounts,' he said. 'Thakkar received 5% commission every time an amount duped from a victim was credited into the accounts provided by him,' the police officer said. Investigators said that besides Thakkar, seven other accused involved in the fraud were arrested from different parts of the country including Chaman from Rampur in Himachal Pradesh. Police said they had managed to seize ₹1.57 crore of the duped amount and give it back to the surgeon whose identity was withheld for security reasons.
