Divestment of BPCL off the table for now, says Hardeep Singh Puri

The disinvestment plans for Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) are currently off the table as the government has not received a sufficient number of bids, Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri has said.

“We want to disinvest, but we cannot have a situation where there’s only one bidder. In the last year or so, we’ve been facing a bit of turbulence but despite that BPCL has done very well. For now, it (the divestment) is not on the table,” Puri said on the sidelines of the 25th Energy Technology Meet in Mumbai.

The government owns a 52.98 per cent stake in the oil major. But potential buyers who had shown interest, including the Vedanta Group, Apollo Global Management,