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Cat I and Cat II AIFs are also allowed to leverage money for a brief period. In a board meeting held today in Mumbai, SEBI allowed Cat I and Cat II AIFs to do short term borrowing in an event of a shortfall in drawdown from investors.
AIFs raise commitment from investors. However, such a commitment happens in tranches throughout the fund raising tenure. In most cases, such a tenure goes up to 5 years. And whenever the fund managers demand money from an investor, it is called drawdown. When investors default on such a payment affecting the entire AIF strategy, such short term borrowing is supposed to take care of this aspect.
SEBI clarified that these AIFs can borrow funds for a period up to 30 days. However, AIFs will have to recover interest payment from the investor responsible for the shortfall.
In addition, AIFs will have to maintain a cooling period of 30 days between two borrowings.
In another development, SEBI capped the extension tenure in Large Value Funds (LVF) for accredited investors who have higher net worth and risk handling capacity.
LVFs can be extended for a maximum of 5 years, regardless of the basic tenure of the scheme. This extension will require approval from a minimum two-thirds of the investors. If the fund is still not liquidated, it can choose another dissolution period like other AIFs.
The LVF schemes who have not specified a cap on the extension of their tenure or who have an extension tenure of more than 5 years will have to comply to this regulation within the next 3 months. The regulator also allowed such LVFs to adjust their original base tenure based on the consent of all their investors.