Government is set to offer 10% shares in India's largest non-life insurance company New India Assurance through an offer for sale to the public. The Centre may also do a similar dilution in the General Insurance Corporation (GIC Re). However, the timing is not decided. The government had divested close to 15% stakes in both New India and GIC in 2017. The disinvestment of GIC Re resulted in a mop-up of £1.14 billion and New India’s IPO raised £960 million. Both the companies are currently trading at big discounts to their issue price. One of the reasons for not going public was that the shares are considered to be undervalued as not only are their prices at a 20% discount to book value, but also that New India has legacy investments in equities and real estate that are not reflected in the book value. Besides ambitious pricing in the IPO, another reason for the discounts is the relatively lower level of liquidity in the shares. Large chunks of the shares are held by public sector institutions.
RBI governor tests positive for Covid
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Shaktikanta Das has tested positive for Covid-19. He has been regularly attending the RBI central office building in Mumbai through the pandemic. Das disclosed his testing positive in a tweet where he said that he was asymptomatic and was feeling very much all right and would continue to work from isolation. “Work in the RBI will go on normally. I am in touch with all the deputy governors and other officers through video-conferencing and telephone,” he said in his statement. The infection was detected during a routine test. According to an RBI spokesperson, the central office will continue to remain operational. The RBI has four deputy governors - P Kanungo, M K Jain, Michael Patra and M Rajeshwar Rao. The deputy governors have all tested negative. The central office will continue to remain operational as usual as it undergoes frequent sanitisation and there are safeguards, including thermal screening and regular disinfection.
As vaccine work starts, DRL hacked
Dr Reddy’s Laboratories (DRL) was the target of a cyber attack less than a week after it received approvals to start Phase II and III trials of the Russian Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V in India. Although the company refused to say if the hackers tried to steal vaccine-related data, the attacks have come at a time when Covid-19 vaccine developers across the world have been facing similar threats. The data breach at DRL took place last week and reportedly forced the company to shut all its global manufacturing facilities. The breach, which is believed to have taken place at the company’s own data centre, also brought down its website for a few hours.
Sebi bars 3 Kirloskars from markets
India’s markets regulator Sebi has barred three Kirloskar brothers from dealing in the securities market for up to six months as it found them guilty of violating insider trading rules. The regulator has also fined the siblings for making ill-gotten gains from certain transactions in the publicly listed Kirloskar Brothers between March 2010 and April 2011. Sebi, through three separate orders, has banned Atul and Rahul Kirloskar, promoters of Kirloskar Industries, from tapping the capital market for six months, while Sanjay Kirloskar, promoter of Kirloskar Brothers, has been barred for three months. The brothers, their family members as well as their companies have been asked by Sebi to cough up nearly £5.7 million. The three siblings have been in a legal battle since 2018 after Atul and Rahul complained about mismanagement in Kirloskar Brothers.
