No merchant banker, no indicative price, no filing of cumbersome draft red-herring prospectus with market regulator SEBI. Yet, ABB’s Swiss promoter met SEBI’s prescribed minimum public shareholding norm of 25 per cent. All it did was sell one share!
Engineering major ABB on Thursday informed the exchanges that its promoter, ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd, Zurich, Switzerland, sold one share through the NSE on February 5 to meet minimum public shareholding norm.
According to SEBI norms, before June end, all the listed PSUs should have a minimum 10 per cent public shareholding, while companies in the private sector should have 25 per cent.
SEBI had asked companies to follow any one of the five methods — follow-on public offer, offer-for-sale, institutional placement, bonus/rights issue — for increasing the public shareholding.
But ABB obtained SEBI’s waiver from this. According to SEBI sources, the company got a relaxation on a ‘case-to-case’ basis. This saved the company not only the cost but from the time consuming laborious process also.
At the end of December, promoters held 15,89,31,282 shares (15.89 crore), which is 75.00000035392655 per cent of the total paid-up capital. After the sale , their total stake slipped to 74.99999988202428 per cent.
“The company, therefore, now has fulfilled the requirements of the provision of Clause 40A of the Listing Agreement,” it said in a notification to the exchange.
On Thursday, the shares of ABB closed 1.70 per cent lower at Rs 654 on the BSE.