ONGC not yet ready for stake-sale: Disinvestment Secy

ONGC not yet ready for stake-sale: Disinvestment Secy

State-owned oil explorer ONGC is not yet ready for stake sale and the government will consider divesting it only after the subsidy sharing mechanism between upstream companies and centre is finalized and oil prices rebound, Disinvestment Secretary Aradhana Johri said on Tuesday.

"All I can say is that ONGC is not ready for sale as of now," Johri told Business Standard in her first post-budget interview.

Speaking on the 2015-16 PSU disinvestment target of Rs 41,000 crore, the secretary said that the Department of Disinvestment already had in place a pipeline of more than Rs 30,000 crore in various stages of cabinet and regulatory approval.

While Johri declined to name the stocks up for disinvestment, she sounded a word of caution on the composition of the basket. "Most of these are metal and oil stocks. And one should remember that glob commodity prices are down," she said.

On the issue of strategic disinvestment, budgeted at Rs 28,500 crore for 2015-16, Johri said that it was a statement of intent by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, following which the government was looking at all options open to it, among loss making and profit making PSUs.