Kotak Special Situations Fund invests $502 million so far with $1-bn corpus

Kotak Special Situations Fund, one among the most important special situation, credit and distressed asset funds, has invested over half its $1-billion initial corpus in eight companies, and can scout to boost an identical amount from investors later this year or early next year, a top company official has said.

Kotak Investment Advisors, a neighborhood of Kotak Mahindra Bank, February 2019 launched KSSF as an AIF special situations fund with a $1-billion corpus. It received 50 per cent maiden money from the UAE sovereign wealth fund Abu Dhabi Investment Authority ($500 million), 25 per cent ($250 million) from the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, and therefore the rest between Premji Invest and Kotak Group.

The fund hopes to finish deals worth 65 per cent ($650 million) of its corpus by September. Typically, funds like KSSF prop up capital once they spend 75 per cent of the prevailing capital and are sector-and instrument-agnostic when it involves resolving stressed assets issues.

CEO Eshwar Karra said that,  Either it picks up assets/stressed asset opportunity from the IBC/National Company Law Tribunal processes and others are those companies which look for one-time settlements with their lenders to avoid bankruptcy.

He also added that, “We have so far deployed $502 million of our $1-billion fund in eight companies. The first investment of Rs 500 crore was made in January 2020 in Jindal Stainless. We hope to pick up more assets by investing another Rs 1,000 crore by September.”