Govt will wait for more suitors to sell BPCL, says DIPAM Secretary
India will not rush into selling the country’s second-biggest state refiner if it ends up with a lone suitor, according to the top bureaucrat overseeing asset sales.
“We need competitive bids, we can’t do it with a single bid,” Tuhin Kanta Pandey, secretary in the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management, said in an interview on the sale of Bharat Petroleum Corp. “In the expressions of interest, we have listed the people, multiple people. They must come in.”
On Friday, BPCL shares in Mumbai closed trading 0.2% lower, paring earlier losses of as much as 0.8%.
So far three suitors — the Vedanta group, Apollo Global Management Inc. and I Squared Capital Advisors — have expressed interest in buying the government’s 53% stake in BPCL.
