FIs bid at ceiling price for PTC, Petronet LNG, Dredging Corporation

Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), the General Insurance Corporation of India (GIC) along with its four erstwhile subsidiaries, and the Unit Trust of India (UTI) have bid aggressively for Dredging Corporation of India Ltd (DCI) at Rs 400, while for Power Trading Corporation (PTC) the bid was Rs 16.

The bid for Petronet LNG Ltd (PLL) from the institutions was at Rs 15. They had bid at the floor price for IBP, GAIL and IPCL shares.The floor price for DCI was at Rs 385, while for PTC and PLL were Rs 14 and Rs 15, respectively.

LIC and GIC had earlier received board approval for applying for 10 - 15 per cent of the shares on sale through the government's divestment process and has decided to go ahead with the decision for almost all the issues. They had also taken a decision to decide jointly on the price at which to invest in each of these issues.

A highly placed executive at LIC's investment department said, "We have bid on the higher side for these three issues for we wanted to make sure we would be allotted a substantial portion of the bids that we have made."

LIC and other financial institutions have already bid through the respective book builders, well ahead of the closure of these issues, thereby deviating from their common practice of applying on the last day of closure of an issue.

The DCI issue closes on March 4, while the PTC float closes on March 8 and the PLL issue on March 9. According to the latest available data "" as of March 3, the DCI issue was over subscribed 2.5 times, the PTC issue was oversubscribed 3.05 times and only Petronet was yet to be fully subscribed "" it has managed a subscription of just 37 per cent till now.

Being a net seller in the stock market till sometime back, LIC has now decided to be an aggressive investor in the stock market. LIC generally invests large sums of funds in the equity market towards the end of a fiscal.

It has decided to invest around Rs 2,000 crore into the stock market towards the end of the fiscal.