| The company would decide the commodity exchange for the venture "" either National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX) or Multi Commodities Exchange (MCX) "" in the next two weeks. |
| The company board had recently set up a sub-committee to select the trading agent. |
| On Wednesday senior officials of MCX said that even if GSPCL selects NCDEX as its trading agent, the bourse would try to tie up with GAIL India for online gas trading in other parts of the country. |
| In July GSPCL had signed a memorandum of understanding with NCDEX for online gas trading. Later the company and Gujarat State Petronet Ltd (GSPL), the gas pipeline entity of GSPCL, decided to look into the proposals of both NCDEX and MCX, before finalising the trading agent. |
| "Though we had a plan earlier to kick off online gas trading in December 2004, it got delayed because we wanted to check the merits of both NCDEX and MCX," said C K Koshy, chairman, GSPCL, on Wednesday. |
| He said the process of choosing the trading agent would be over in two-three weeks. |
| Interestingly, GSPCL is the largest single buyer of natural gas in India even as it picks up majority of the liquefied natural gas produced by Petronet LNG. |
| Jignesh Shah, managing director of MCX, said: "GSPCL and GSPL are the best options for us for entering into gas trading. We are also in talks with GAIL as it has substantial pipeline in other parts of the country. We can operate for both GSPCL and GAIL if both of them agree to use MCX as the trading partner." |
| On Wednesday, MCX officials, including Joseph Massey, deputy managing director of MCX, met industry leaders here to sell the concept of online gas trading. The bourse also had an interaction with senior officials from Shell Hazira, GSPCL, Essar Group, Gujarat Adani Energy and others. |
| According to Massey, as an attractive business proposition, MCX would not charge gas buyers much except trading fees. |
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