ONGC says FT holds 1.06%; pares LIC holding to 7.7% from 9.47% reported earlier
Franklin Templeton Investment Funds (FTIF), a foreign institutional investor (FII), could emerge as the second significant investor in the auction of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) shares by the Union government two weeks ago.
FTIF's holding crossed one per cent, according to a company filing late on Monday, suggesting the fund bought a significant number of shares in the government's auction last week. FTIF holds 90.93 million shares or 1.06 per cent in ONGC as on March 9, 2012, according to the filing dated March 12.
According to Bloomberg data, two FTIF entities — Templeton Asia Growth Fund and Templeton Emerging market Fund — together held 77.18 million shares as on December 31. This translates additional purchases of 13.75 million shares between December 31 and March 9. However, Business Standard could not independently ascertain if all or any of these shares were bought in the auction on March 1. The government sold 420.3 million ONGC shares at Rs 303.67 a piece on March 1 to raise Rs 12,766 crore.
ONGC also gave a new figure of holdings of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) in the company, furthering the confusion over how many shares the insurer bought in the auction. According to the latest ONGC filing, LIC now holds 664 million shares or 7.7 per cent in the company as on March 9. This is much lower than the LIC holding figure of 810 million shares or 9.47 per cent reported by the company, exactly a week ago.
According to the new figures, LIC’s stake has increased by 358 million shares between December 31 and March 9. It is still not clear how many shares were actually bought in the government auction by LIC. “The earlier figure of 377 million was net open market purchases, which included shares bought and sold by LIC in the weeks preceding the auction. Even the new figure of 358 million shares will include such sales and purchases done outside the auction,” said a senior official familiar with the development.
An LIC spokesperson declined to give the exact number of shares purchased in the auction. “You should check with the exchanges,” he said.
The exchanges declined to do so saying they were only obliged to give it to the company. The latter in turn, has been reporting contradictory numbers of LIC’s shareholding, without attempting to reconcile. While the company has been reporting holdings details based on data from registrars, LIC has been a different number, based on its own data.
In the past, some private companies have pointed out to LIC when it had reported wrong numbers and reported the reconciled numbers shows their records. In a disclosure in August 2011, IDFC clearly noted that while LIC has reported a holding of 9.983 per cent, according to its depository positions its holding was only 9.973 per cent. It went on to say there were no shareholders under the client ID reported by LIC.
However, neither ONGC nor LIC has made any such attempt to reconcile the data. “We report these numbers to the exchanges based on data we receive from the registrars. We have written to the exchanges for the right method of reporting institutional shareholding,” said an ONGC official, “We have 40,000 shareholders. It is not possible to reconcile and report data provided by each and every shareholder,” he added.
An LIC official said, "We have reported correctly. It is for them (ONGC) to change."
