The follow-on public offer (FPO) of the largest upstream oil company, Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), may be deferred to the next financial year, the company has indicated.
“My hunch is that the share sale may not happen this year, but we will be ready by the fourth quarter of this financial year,” ONGC chairman and managing director R S Sharma said at the Economic Editors’ Conference here on Wednesday.
The proposed 5% divestment in ONGC is likely to fetch the government around Rs11,000 crore.
The government has a target of raising Rs40,000 crore in the current fiscal from disinvestment in PSUs.
Post FPO, the government’s shareholding in ONGC will come down to 69.14% from the current 74.14%.
Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had on Tuesday said that the idea was not to saturate the market through disinvestment.
He also said that the Budget target for disinvestment at Rs40,000 crore was an “indicative target”.
The finance minister referred to the successful 3G spectrum auction earlier this year, to point out that the government would not disinvest PSUS just to raise revenue.
“We overtook our own estimates by a wide margin in the case of 3G auction—-we had targeted to raise Rs35,000 crore from 3G bidding of airwaves, but actually got over Rs1 lakh crore from the exercise,” Mukherjee said.
Meanwhile, ONGC has appointed two independent auditors for certifying company’s oil and gas reserves, ahead of the company’s FPO.
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