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Govt to divest 5% stake in BEL, eyes Rs 1.6k cr

Last Updated 21 February 2017, 16:32 IST

 Bengaluru-based Bharat Electronics (BEL) will go under the hammer on Wednesday and Thursday, with the government deciding to offload 5% of its stake in the public sector defence company.

The share sale is expected to fetch the exchequer around Rs 1,600 crore at the current market price.

The floor price for the sale of 1.11 crore shares has been fixed at Rs 1,498 per share, a top government official said. The government currently holds 74.41% stake in BEL.

The share sale will be done through the OFS (offer for sale) route. OFS helps promoters of a listed company to dilute stake through an exchange platform. The first day of the OFS will be reserved for institutional investors and the second day for retail investors. The government has so far raised about Rs 30,000 crore through minority share sale by way of OFS, share buyback and CPSE ETF in the current fiscal. The disinvestment target for the current fiscal is revised at Rs 45,500 crore.

The government has lined up one more PSU divestment this week and hopes to cross the revised target of Rs 45,500 crore for the first time in the past six years. The original target for 2016-17 was Rs 56,500 crore, which was later revised.

In 2015-16 too, the government had revised the divestment target to Rs 30,000 crore from an earlier  Rs 69,500 crore, trimming it by more than 57%. In the past six years, however, the government has never met its share sale target.

Despite that the target for the coming fiscal (2017-18) has been raised a steep Rs 72,500 crore.

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(Published 21 February 2017, 16:32 IST)

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