The Coal Mines Provident Fund Organisation (CMPFO) is likely to take the final call soon on selecting a fund manager to manage about Rs 70,000 crore provident fund corpus of coal industry workers, an official said.
It has short-listed three fund managers, including SBI.
A senior CMPFO official, who did not wish to be quoted, said the board may soon take the final call.
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"Three fund managers are State Bank of India (SBI), Reliance Capital Asset Management Company (RCAM), ICICI Securities Primary Dealership and Darashaw," he added.
The three shortlisted companies have agreed to manage the investible corpus at the floor price of 0.01 per cent per annum, the official added.
The development comes against the backdrop of a Parliamentary panel last year raising objections on CMPFO not parking a huge Rs 45,886.45 crore with it then with the public sector banks and suggesting to refer the matter to a central investigating agency.
The official said agency Brickwork Rating was engaged to undertake the evaluation of technical bids for selection of fund managers.
"Total Investible Funds being administered by CMPFO is to the tune of Rs 69,421.50 crore which includes Special Deposit Scheme, 1975 funds to the tune of Rs 16,522.50 crores, as on March 31, 2014," he said.
The official added that the Board of Trustees of the CMPFO was to take the final call on October 17 but the meeting could not take place and it is now likely to take place soon.
The CMPFO is an autonomous organisation governed by the Board of Trustees and functions under the supervision of Ministry of Coal and administers Coal Mines Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provision Act, 1948 and various schemes framed under the Act.
Last year, the Standing Committee on Coal and Steel, headed by Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee, had said that CMPFO had invested Rs 29,363.95 crore in ICICI Securities Primary Dealership Ltd besides Rs 16,522.5 crore in the Special Deposit Scheme of the Ministry of Finance, "which does not seem appropriate".
"The Committee have failed to understand why these funds were not invested in public sector banks," the panel had said.
Raising questions on the role of the Coal Ministry to protect workers interests, it had said it was "dismayed" that there was no monitoring mechanism in the Ministry and even the "then Commissioner CMPFO had acted beyond his delegated powers by extending the tenure of fund managers without taking approval of Board of Trustees (BOT)".
