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The government has no plans to sell its part stake in ITC, held through SUUTI, amid BAT paring its stake through a block deal in the Kolkata-based FMCG player, a top official said on Wednesday. As on December 31, 2023, Specified Undertaking of Unit Trust of India (SUUTI) held around 7.82 per cent stake in the diversified conglomerate ITC. "There is no such plan at the moment," Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey told PTI. SUUTI last pared a stake in ITC in February 2017, when two per cent equity was sold at a price of Rs 291.95 per share via block deal. In a block deal, two parties make a transaction involving shares worth at least Rs 5 crore. Block deal transactions are conducted in a separate trading window. British multinational BAT Plc on Tuesday said it plans to sell up to 3.5 per cent stake in India's ITC Ltd to institutional investors through a block trade. Following this, the shareholding of BAT will come down to 25.5
The government has garnered about Rs 3,839 crore by selling a 1.5 per cent stake in Axis Bank, held through SUUTI. Last week the government sold a 1.5 per cent stake in Axis Bank through the Specified Undertaking of the Unit Trust of India (SUUTI). The floor price for the offer was Rs 830.63 per equity share. "Government has received about Rs 3,839 crore from the sale of Axis Bank shares held by SUUTI," the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey tweeted. Shares of Axis Bank closed at Rs 854.65, down 0.44 per cent against the previous close on BSE. With the sale of the SUUTI stake, the disinvestment proceeds mopped up so far this fiscal increased to Rs 28,383 crore. The budget target from disinvestment in the current fiscal (Apr-March) is pegged at Rs 65,000 crore.
M Saraswathy and Samie Modak's front-page lead report, "Suuti stake: LIC faces investment cap hurdle" (July 14) has once again raised my curiosity about the benefits of so-called "disinvestment" by the government.Previous governments had made big claims - preceded by huge targets -about the sale of their stake in various public sector undertakings (PSU) and other industrial undertakings. This was ostensibly done to achieve the bigger objective of poll promise and the grandiose slogan that the "government has no business to be in business" and money raised from such sales got added to the government's coffers, supposedly helping reduce fiscal deficit. This pet slogan started with the P V Narsimha Rao regime soon after the historic policy shift of 1991 and has continued ever since.But does it really achieve what it is supposed to?In most cases, a majority of the government stake was picked up by the cash-rich government undertaking called the LIC. It was really a case of transfer of mone