Petroleum Minister Ram Naik said the terms and conditions of the strategic sale of HPCL and and public offer in BPCL would be worked out by a core group of secretaries on divestment.
The government is going ahead with divestment of Balmer Lawrie & Company with the asset valuers Dalal Mott McDonalds slated to submit its report to the divestment ministry in the coming weeks.
Government has targeted to garner about Rs 56,500 crore through selling its stake in PSUs.
The guidelines for strategic disinvestment were issued on Monday itself when Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented the Union Budget for 2016-17.
The idea is to do away with the need for the approval of the Core Group of Secretaries on Divestment for privatisation of companies, especially in non-strategic sectors.
The core group of secretaries on divestment scrutinised the financial bids for sale of newsprint maker NEPA and took up the issue of the divestment of equity in a slew of PSUs.
The government is likely to finalise by the third week of this month, the advisor for divestments of Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd for which over half a dozen merchant bankers are in the race.\n\n\n\n
The Divestment Ministry is moving fast to restart the sell-off process and go ahead with divestment in oil PSUs -- HPCL and BPCL.\n\n\n\n
The government is believed to have zeroed in on DSP Merill Lynch for appointment as advisor and UBS and I-Sec as lead manager for the proposed public offer in Bharat Petroleum Corporation.
The Core Group of Secretaries on Divestment is believed to have favoured the appointment of HSBC as the global advisor for managing the privatisation of oil PSU Hindustan Petroleum Corporation.\n\n
Former RBI governor D Subbarao has suggested that the government should come up with a 10-year road map for privatisation of all Public Sector Banks (PSBs) as it would provide much needed predictability to stakeholders. Subbarao further said that the big bang approach to privatisation of state-owned banks is not desirable but at the same time the issue should not be put on the back burner. "Ideally, we should have a road map, maybe over a 10 year timeframe, to privatise all PSBs. "That will give much needed predictability to all stakeholders," he told PTI.
Tata Sons has emerged as the top bidder for the takeover of debt-laden State-run airline Air India but the bid is yet to be approved by a group of ministers headed by Home Minister Amit Shah, sources said.
The Centre has conceded most of the demands of potential buyers of Neelachal Ispat Nigam Ltd (NINL). These include lowering the lock-in period for sale of assets to one year and allowing the new buyer to undertake the amalgamation of a special purpose vehicle (SPV) into NINL. An inter-ministerial group led by Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (Dipam) secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey and the core group of secretaries on divestment (CGD) headed by Cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba have decided that the lock-in period can be reduced to one year from the date of completion of sale, from the earlier three years proposed by Dipam, an official in the know said.
No other corporate house in India is in a better position than Tata group for the takeover of debt-laden airline Air India, former deputy chairman of erstwhile Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia said on Thursday. Tata Sons has emerged as the top bidder for the takeover of the state-run airline but the bid is yet to be approved by a group of ministers headed by Home Minister Amit Shah. "You can't have a better corporate, with a better position than the Tatas, we can hand it (state-run airline Air India) over," he said while replying to a question in a virtual event.
Govt bosses in no hurry to exit from PSUs; many agencies, long process likely hurdles.
In a first, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday met the secretaries of all the government departments collectively and asked them to directly get in touch with him to resolve issues and expedite decision-making.
For next fiscal, the minority stake sale target has been kept at Rs 36,000 crore.
Doubts over implementation of a Cabinet-approved strategic sale policy are puzzling.
According to officials, more clarity might be required with regard to foreign fund managers in the context of Air India divestment.
The department of investment and public asset management (Dipam) can also seek in-principle approval from the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) for strategic divestment of PSUs on a case-to-case basis considering investor appetite and sectoral trends.
The Centre's push to sell Air India on priority has led to delays in other strategic divestment proposals, such as privatising United India Insurance, as well as ongoing transactions, such as Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) and Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL), revealed multiple officials involved in the process. The Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) is yet to take new privatisation recommendations of the NITI Aayog to the core group of secretaries on disinvestment (CGD) headed by the Cabinet secretary, said one of the officials. The priority now is to ensure all approvals for Air India are in place since the government intends to hand over the national carrier as early as this month.
Jaitley did not say if it will be an outright sale or partial divestment.
The NITI Aayog has recommended privatisation of state-owned insurer United India Insurance Company as the government aims to move ahead with its new public sector enterprise (PSE) policy for Atmanirbhar Bharat. The policy think tank has suggested that the public sector insurer be considered for privatisation in the banking, insurance and financial services sector, which has been classified as 'strategic' in the PSE policy, said an official. The policy proposes the "bare minimum" presence of government-owned companies in strategic sectors, and privatisation, merger or closure of remaining public sector undertakings (PSUs).
Coming Wednesday, Finance Minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman will present the 2023 Union Budget - the last full Budget ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. While India exited 2022 as a relatively bright spot in the global economy, the FM will endeavour to present a Budget that insulates India's economy against global headwinds and recession in advanced economies, while sticking to the path of fiscal consolidation. In this, she is being helped by her core team of trusted advisors.
The government on Monday signed the share purchase agreement with Tata Sons for the sale of national carrier Air India for Rs 18,000 crore. Earlier this month, the government had accepted an offer by Talace Pvt Ltd, a unit of the holding company of the salt-to-software conglomerate, to pay Rs 2,700 crore cash and take over Rs 15,300 crore of the airline's debt. Following that, on October 11 a Letter of Intenet (LoI) was issued to the Tata Group confirming the government's willingness to sell its 100 per cent stake in the airline.
The Duncans Goenka group is in a spot of bother over the death of workers and non-payment of dues to employees.
Two aborted missions, three different ministers, multiple rule changes and two decades later, Indian taxpayers will no longer have to pay Rs 20 crore per day to keep the loss-making Air India flying. While opposition Congress expectedly attacked the decision as selling the family silver, DIPAM secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey said what Tata is getting is not a cash cow but an airline which is bleeding where money needs to be pumped in to refurbish obsolete aircraft and dust up strangled ones while being unable to touch any employee for one year and only be able to resize staff after paying a VRS. "It won't be a very easy task there. Only advantage is they (new Air India owner) are paying the price which they think they can manage. "They are not taking the excessive debt accumulated to fund years of losses. We are continuing it as an ongoing concern.... This process has also saved huge amount of taxpayers money going forward," Pandey told PTI.
RIL said it had launched 'an internal probe' into its staff's detention.
It is Air India's only profitable subsidiary. In 2016-17, it clocked a profit of over Rs 33.4 crore, earning Rs 620 crore in revenues from its handling operations.
At 15.05 PM, the 30-share Sensex was up 281 points at 28,238 and the 50-share Nifty gained 86 points at 8,577
India was the flavour of the year, at least in the FMCG sector, as multinationals hiked stakes in their subsidiaries lured by long term potential of the country, while homegrown executives made their way to top hierarchy of global firms in 2013.
With Beijing having had a profound rethink on India's admission as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the tectonic plates of the geopolitics of a massive swathe of the planet stretching from the Asia-Pacific to West Asia are dramatically shifting. That grating noise in the Central Asian steppes will be heard far and wide -- as far as North America, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
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