According to reports from Mint, Ola Electric Mobility Ltd's payments to Krutrim SI Designs Pvt., an AI company owned by its chairman Bhavish Aggarwal, nearly quadrupled to ₹100 crore in FY26. The payments comprised ₹54 crore for services purchased from Krutrim, up from ₹26 crore a year earlier, and a first-of-its-kind ₹46 crore advance for services that had been ordered but not yet invoiced as of 31 March. As reported by Mint, these transactions have prompted concerns from governance experts about related-party deals.
According to Mint, Srinath Sridharan, corporate adviser and independent director, said promoter-related transactions can raise questions about the role of the listed company's board in approving such payments. "The issue is not merely whether the transaction complied with the prescribed process, but whether the process provided genuine assurance that the listed company received an arm's-length outcome," Sridharan stated. The overlap between the boards of the two companies raises questions about how independently such payments are assessed and whether shareholders have enough information to judge whether the deals are on arm's-length terms. Regulation 23 of the SEBI LODR Regulations requires prior approval of related-party transactions by the listed entity's Audit Committee, with approval resting with its independent directors.
As reported by Mint, Ola Electric's six-member board comprises Aggarwal, Shradha Sharma, Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti, Manoj Kumar Kohli, Arun Sarin and ND Shashank. Sharma, Kohli and Shashank are independent directors, while Tenneti and Sarin are non-executive, non-independent directors. Krutrim's five-member board has no independent directors. Besides Aggarwal, its two non-executive, non-independent directors are Tenneti and Sarin. The presence of common board members across the two entities raises questions about the independence of the assessment, according to governance experts.
According to Mint, an Ola Electric spokesperson said the transactions were conducted in the ordinary course of business and complied with applicable regulations. "Ola Electric has fully migrated its cloud and AI infrastructure to Krutrim, and expenses to external cloud vendors now stand at zero," the spokesperson stated. The company explained that amounts paid to Krutrim are against services contracted and ordered by the company, with invoices for certain orders not raised as of the book-closing date, reflecting advances. The spokesperson emphasized that the transactions were conducted at arm's length and have been approved through the company's established corporate governance processes, fully compliant with the Companies Act, 2013 and SEBI (LODR) Regulations.
As reported by Mint, the increase in payments came even as Ola Electric's overall expenses nearly halved to ₹3,245 crore during the year as the company pursued cost savings to control operating expenses. These payments come amid pending insolvency petitions against Ola Electric from two vendors over unpaid dues of over ₹40 crore. The disclosures also show that Ola Electric's trade payables fell to ₹5 crore as of 31 March 2026 from ₹26 crore a year earlier, which could indicate that ₹21 crore of outstanding dues were settled during the year, although the reduction in trade payables was not independently verified. Gaurav Pingle from Forefront Legal Consulting noted that transactions involving entities in which directors have direct interest are assessed both from a compliance and governance perspective, with listed entities required to share more information about such related party transactions when volumes have increased significantly.
