Pushed to the wall, Kochhar finally throws in the towel, quits ICICI Bank

“It’s for others to decide my achievements,” Chanda Kochhar, former managing director and chief executive officer of ICICI Bank, said in an interview last year. She didn’t know it then but those words couldn’t have been more prescient.

Even as her stated objective might have been to build a sustainable growth model for her bank, the past five months have put Kochhar in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons such as allegations of conflict of interest and quid pro quo in extending loans to Videocon Industries, which had funded NuPower Renewables, the firm of her husbaand, Deepak Kochhar.

The ICICI Bank board backed her initially but later appointed former Supreme Court judge B N Srikrishna to conduct an independent investigation. The onslaught from stakeholders saw Kochhar fight a battle that put her back to the wall, and if it’s testimony to her sheer tenacity as a fighter, most of India Inc wasn’t sure which way the wind was going to blow because of her refusal to crumble under pressure. In the end, Kochhar threw in the towel and the bank’s board accepted her resignation. As if on cue, the markets responded lifting the ICICI Bank stock up by 4 per cent.