new Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday that the central government may reconsider the timing of the initial public offering (IPO) of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
According to a Bloomberg report, “Ideally, I would go ahead with it because we had planned it on purely Indian considerations for some time,” Sitharaman said in an interview with BusinessLine, “but If global views warrant that I need to see it, I won’t mind watching it again,” she said.
The review could affect the timing of the mega public offering, India’s biggest, which formed the largest part of the country’s $10.4 billion asset-sales program aimed at bridging the budget deficit for the year by March 31, 2022 .
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The government had set a March deadline for the IPO and the insurance giant’s embedded value was Rs 5.4 lakh crore in its IPO document filed on February 13.
“When a private sector promoter takes this call, all he has to do is inform the company’s board,” the minister said, when asked whether any call was interrupted about delay in the IPO from the government’s annual disinvestment targets. It is possible. “But I have to explain it to the whole world,” she said.
The Union Cabinet has recently approved up to 20 per cent of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) through the automatic route in LIC to accelerate the disinvestment of the country’s largest insurer.
The state-run insurer is planning to sell a 5 per cent stake next month to raise around $8 billion, which could make it India’s biggest IPO ever.