A private equity arm of Standard Chartered today bought close to 10 per cent of Redington India from its promoter and another key investor for a sum of over Rs 365 crore. These shares were acquired from Redington Mauritius, classified as the company’s promoter with the stock exchanges and Taiwan-based Synnex Technology International Corp, a strategic investor in the IT and technology logistics provider. The transaction was done through the bulk deal window of the Bombay Stock Exchange today. Standard Chartered Private Equity, Mauritius bought 3,97,36,500 shares of Redington India for a price of Rs 91.89 per share. Another institutional investor, ECL Finance, acquired 79,50,000 shares at Rs 91.90. The sellers were Redington Mauritius, which offloaded 3,04,80,673 shares, and Synnex Mauritius that sold 1,58,95,000 shares. In all, close to 12 per cent of Redington’s equity changed hands. The purchase price marks a premium of nearly 4 per cent to the closing price of the Redington scrip at the bourses on Friday. Despite the transactions, the Redington stock fell 0.39 per cent to Rs 88.50 on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Shareholding data for the period ended March 31 showed that Redington Mauritius (an arm of Kewalram Chanrai Group from Singapore) held 28.89 per cent of the company’s equity. At the same time, Synnex held 27.80 per cent of its equity. Latest data from the Bombay Stock Exchange shows the promoter’s holding in Redington for the period ended May 27 has come down to 28.80 per cent. It is believed that as a consequence of today’s deal, the stakes held by both these big investors would have fallen below 26 per cent. This is the second action coming from a PE player over the past few days. Recently, Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm, announced that it is investing Rs 2,250 crore ($500 million) in the Welspun group. The investment will be made in steel pipe maker Welspun Corp Ltd (WCL) and two other companies in the group that included Welspun Maxteel Ltd and Welspun Infratech Ltd. |
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
PE investor for Redington
Tata bid to take off in aerospace
The $70-billion Tata group is quietly building its presence in the aerospace industry that has recently seen significant investment from the private sector. It is in the process of applying for licenses from several central government ministries, predominantly the defence ministry, to sell helicopters that it plans to assemble at its joint venture with Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica’s AgustaWestland. The Tata group and AgustaWestland decided in early 2009 to form a joint venture that would establish a plant to assemble the AW 119 helicopter — an eight-seater utility copter meant for both defence and civilian uses. The deliveries were supposed to start by 2011, but the deadline has since been pushed back by a year. The joint venture was concurrently applying for licences as it went about putting up the assembly unit in Hyderabad. At the time the joint venture was formed, the production target was fixed at 30 units a year. The Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) has estimated that the Hyderabad-based greenfield facility of this joint venture is likely to entail an investment of $30 million. The joint venture company, Indian Rotorcraft, will assemble and deliver these helicopters. It will target domestic as well as global customers. Estimates indicate that India will be a key market for helicopters with an expected demand of 800 units in the next decade from both the public and private sector. Late last year, another Tata group company, Tata Advanced Systems Ltd, rolled out the first made-in-India Sirkorzy S-92 helicopter cabins from Andhra Pradesh. These helicopter cabins, which were previously manufactured in Japan, were exported to Sirkozy’s assembly plant in the US. A recent paper by the CAPA on aerospace manufacturing in India said the Tatas and the Mahindra group with strong financial credentials had entered into various alliances to manufacture parts and assemble machines under offset agreements. “However, there are strong prospects and good reasons for these groups to move from defence offset to licensed manufacturing and beyond to civil aviation manufacturing as the defence market becomes saturated,” it added. Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) had acquired Aerostaff Australia and Gippsland Aeronautics in 2009 as a part of Rs 1.75-billion investment and capacity building forays into aerospace components and aircraft manufacturing. Recent reports said Mahindra Aerospace Pvt. Ltd, the aerospace unit of M&M, is scouting for a technology partner to make aircraft components at a proposed plant in Bangalore. The CAPA says that the interest shown in aviation by industrial houses suggests a real opportunity for India to develop a presence in international aerospace manufacturing where other developing economies such as Brazil have done well. |
Lean years of Osama ‘broke’ Laden - Cash crunch forced Qaida to jump off high horse and order kidnappings: Documents by CHRISTINA LAMB
 Osama bin Laden was so short of money during his final years in hiding that he ordered his fighters to kidnap foreign diplomats for ransom, it was revealed yesterday.Documents found in the compound where he was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, portray a cash-strapped al Qaida severely hampered by the economic downturn, which had prompted a fall in donations. This was compounded by a freeze on its international assets and an increase in American drone attacks, one of which killed the organisation’s financial director. The terrorist group was run like a multinational business and Osama, like a chief executive, tried to find new sources of revenue and make cuts. Al Qaida went from offering allowances to its fighters, who at one point were paid $108 a month, to leaving militants to pay for their own bed and board. The organisation has a financial wing headed by skilled accountants who insisted on receipts for every purchase, including computer flash drives costing a few dollars. Messages uncovered in the huge cache of documents recovered in Abbottabad make frequent references to a shortage of funds. In one, the head of al Qaida’s security unit complained about having “a very low budget, a few thousand dollars”, an intelligence official told The Washington Post. In others Osama himself complains about lack of money. John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, told The Sunday Times last week the biggest surprise was that “Bin Laden was far more operationally active and hands-on than we had realised”. But the terrorist leader was also clearly under tremendous pressure, both financially and operationally, from the drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas. “We know from the material from the compound that OBL himself recognised they were being pummelled,” said Brennan. “He wanted to carry out more attacks but his commanders were saying, ‘your aspirations outweigh our capabilities’.” In spring last year, the al Qaida leader sent a message instructing a deputy to form a group that would kidnap diplomats for ransom. Al-Qaida had rarely engaged in kidnapping, preferring to focus on the so-called “spectaculars”, except where abductions could be used as an instrument of vengeance. “It is a simple and clear equation,” Osama once said. “As you kill, you will be killed. As you capture, you will be captured.” With donations drying up it appears he decided to emulate other terrorist groups, such as the Taliban, for whom kidnapping provides an important revenue stream. Terrorist plots can be surprisingly cheap. The September 11 attacks in New York and Washington cost an estimated $500,000, and tens of thousands of dollars in unused funds were sent back by the hijackers to al Qaida accounts. Last year Yemeni operatives boasted that their thwarted attempt to hide bombs in courier packages to blow up two planes cost just $4,500. Brennan said that if it had not been for a tip-off from the Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, “we would definitely have had a couple of airliners coming down, possibly over the US”. Osama needed cash for training, weapons, operatives and their families, bribes and hideouts, including the compound where he lived with his three wives and children. For years the organisation relied primarily on donors who had known Osama since his days of helping the Afghan mujaheddin to fight the Russians in the 1980s or who regarded him as an inspiration. Such funds were hard to track, coming through the informal money-changing hawala system of brokers in the Gulf and central Asia. | ||
Courtesy- THE SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON |
Fitch lowers forecast
Global rating agency Fitch has further lowered its growth forecast for India in 2011 to 7.7 per cent from 8.3 per cent. “The growth has clearly hit a soft patch as GDP grew only 7.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2011, down from 8.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009-10 and 8.9 per cent in the third quarter,” Fitch Ratings said in its report.
Sebi watching share pledge
| The Securities and Exchange Board of India, suspecting possible circumvention of its disclosure norms for share pledging, is mulling changes in the rules to bring to the fore cases of promoters raising funds by keeping shares as “indirect collateral”. The market watchdog is also considering making it mandatory for promoters to disclose the amount of funds raised by share pledging and the utilisation of such proceeds, a senior official said. After the Satyam scam, which revealed the promoters having pledged almost all their shares, Sebi in January 2009 had made it mandatory for promoters of all listed companies to disclose their share pledging activities. However, these norms require only the disclosure of the number and percentage of shares pledged and not the amount of debt or funds raised by keeping shares as collateral. In the recent past, various cases have surfaced when investors have resorted to panic selling after coming to know about the huge amount of funds raised by promoters through share pledging as also by indirect pledging of shares to avoid Sebi’s disclosure norms. Sources said the regulator had received complaints of promoters resorting to informal and private financing arrangements with shares as collateral to avoid the disclosure norms. In many cases, these arrangements are entered into with entities outside the banking system and promoters do not pledge the shares of the listed companies themselves but use the shares of unlisted special purpose vehicles, which are created solely for the purpose of financing. |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)