The Life Insurance Corporation picked up around 37.7 crore shares in the ONGC offer for sale held last week raising its total stake in the company to 9.48 per cent.
In a filing to the exchanges on Monday, ONGC announced that LIC has picked up around 4.4 per cent in the company of the total five per cent offered on sale. The offer for sale process which was concluded last week saw LIC buying about 37.7 crore shares of the 42.7 crore shares that were on offer.
At about Rs 303 a share, LIC pumped in around Rs. 11,426 crore into the issue on offer. The amount received by ONGC through the issue was to the tune of Rs 12,766 crore. The Government had diluted close to five per cent of its stake in the ONGC offer for sale
Heavy scrutiny
ONGC's offer for sale which was open for a day, on the first of this month, came under heavy scrutiny for the dubious nature of the sale process. Till around 3:20 pm on March 1, data on both exchanges showed that only 1.43 crore shares had been bought by the institutional and foreign investors. Retail was said to have stayed away from the issue.
The final figures released by the Government the next day said that a total of 42.04 crore shares had been bought by the end of the sale, which is 98.5 per cent of the total shares on offer. With the 37.7 crore shares bought by LIC and the 1.43 bought on the exchange platforms, a total of 39.14 crores have been accounted for. However, information on the remaining 2.9 crore shares is still not available. Reports claimed that SBI had pitched in at the last minute as well.
This offer for sale was part of the Government's Rs 40,000- crore disinvestment programme.
The scrip of ONGC was up 0.9 per cent to Rs. 283.35 on Monday, but below LIC's buying price of Rs 303.67.