Now SAIL too may bid for foreign firms

The central government is mulling a proposal to relax the existing rules to help facilitate public sector giant Steel Authority Of India (SAIL) to join the race for takeover of foreign steel companies like Mittals and Tatas, according to Steel minister Ramvilas Paswan.

"The existing rules put certain limitations on SAIL when it comes to buying foreign companies. But we will be amending and relaxing the rules to enable the public sector giant make offshore bids," Paswan said at a district dealers' conference here last evening.

Observing that SAIL had already started buying sick public sector units like IISCO, BRL, Neelanchal Inspat and MER, he said buoyed by the profit of Rs 14,000 crore earned by the largest steel manufacturing company, the central goernment was planning to invest Rs 1 lakh crore by 2020 for its expansion.

Ruling out any proposal to sell the company to Arcellor-Mittal, Paswan said "SAIL is doing exceedingly fine." He said his ministry had taken a policy decision for uniform pricing of all steel products of SAIL across the country.

Paswan said SAIL would adopt ten steel villages in the country under social development programme.