Firing a fresh salvo at petroleum and natural gas minister M Veerappa Moily and Reliance Industries, CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta said today that the ministry is sitting on a penalty of $1 billion imposed on RIL in 2011-12 and it also failed to implement relinquishment of 86 per cent of KG-D6 block area held by RIL.  

Earlier, Dasgupta had also accused Moily of working in favour of the Mukesh Ambani-led company by pushing for a gas price hike, saying it would cost an additional subsidy burden of Rs 76,000 crore. In response to that, Moily had said that an import lobby is in action working against gas price hike.

Responding to this, Dasgupta said, “I am not part of any lobby. By the way, the only two companies importing gas in India are two public sector undertakings GAIL and Petronet LNG. Are they part of the import lobby?”   >> Read More

Five-and-a-half months into 2013, the Indian market hasn’t been able to add even one additional foreign investor. SEBI data show that the number of registered FIIs at 1,759, the same as on December 31, 2012.

Even the additions to ‘Sub Account’ category of investors (those who ride piggyback on a registered investor’s account) are lower at 46 this year compared with 59, the same time last year. Also, these numbers are nowhere near the growth posted in 2011 which saw 824 new investors coming on board. Even the new category of non-institutional investors created recently —‘qualified financial investor’ — has not elicited much enthusiasm either, if the measly quantum of monies mobilised is anything to go by (Rs 74 crore till now).

The Finance Ministry’s efforts to attract new foreign investors into India are clearly not proving too effective.WHY THE SLOWDOWN? >> Read More

Ahead of the mid-quarter review of monetary policy tomorrow, the State Bank of India (SBI) has said if the apex bank cannot reduce CRR rate, which is a must for lending rate cuts by banks, they should pay interest on cash reserves that banks park with the monetary authority.

Incidentally, most analysts expect the RBI to hold rates during its mid-quarter monetary policy review.

“If a CRR cut cannot be done due to inflation worries, let the RBI pay us interest on CRR. We will then do the transmission for sure. If the RBI pays me Rs 500 crore on interest on my CRR, I promise to transmit the entire Rs 500 crore to borrowers by reducing my base rate,” SBI chairman Pratip Chaudhuri told PTI recently.

Last year he had triggered off a heated debate by calling for abolition of CRR. He felt that CRR is “dead money” and it had led to a public spat with K C Chakrabarty, the RBI deputy governor in charge of banking services, who said that if the SBI chairman is not comfortable working under existing regulations, he should look for “some other sector”. >> Read More

The Finance Ministry is verifying outward remittances worth Rs 3.56 lakh crore from India during 2011-12 as a major portion was not subject to tax deduction at source (TDS), an official said today.

 ”The Finance Ministry is currently engaged in verifying the remittances made abroad from India as over 70 per cent of remittances going out of India during the financial year 2011-12 were without any tax deduction whatsoever,” Director Income Tax (International Tax), M S Ray said at an Assocham event today.

For 2011-12, there were 7,56,741 foreign remittances made from India with money worth Rs 3,56,461 crore going out of India, he added.

Ray said: “…out of this, tax deduction at source (TDS) made was Rs 12,676 crore representing just three per cent of the total remittances going out of India.” >> Read More

The government will kick start its divestment programme for this fiscal with a 9.33% stake sale in MMTCBSE 2.92 % on Thursday, which may fetch it around Rs 600 crore. 

“We will divest a 9.33% stake in MMTC on Thursday through OFS route,” said Disinvestment Secretary Ravi Mathur after an Empowered Group of Ministers ( EGoM) headed by P Chidambaram gave its approval. The company informed the stock exchange that the floor price for the offer will be Rs 60. The government, which holds a 99.33% stake in the company, will offload 9.33 crore shares. 

MMTC’s scrip closed at Rs 211.45 on BSEup 2.92%. The stake sale will also help the company to meet market regulator Sebi’s minimum public shareholding norm. The stake sale, which was originally slated to take place in March 2013, was deferred due to concern over valuations. In the 2012-13 fiscal, MMTC posted a loss of Rs 70.62 crore, due to 57% dip in revenues during the period as compared to the previous fiscal.  >> Read More

With an aim to arrest rupee slide by boosting forex inflows, RBI on Tuesday raised the limit for online repatriation of export proceeds by over three-fold to $ 10,000 and made it mandatory for units in Special Economic Zones to repatriate full value of exports within 12 months.

The announcements come at a time the rupee has touched life time low of 58.98 against the US dollar.

It has depreciated by 3.5 per cent against dollar in the last two days and by over 8 percent since April 30.”…It has now been decided to increase the value per transaction from $ 3,000 to $ 10,000 for export related remittances received through OPGSPS (Online Payment Gateway Service Providers),” a RBI notification said.Currently banks can offer facility to repatriate export related remittances through OPGSPs for export of goods and services for value not exceeding $ 3,000 per transaction.

In a separate instruction, the RBI asked the units in SEZs to repatriate proceeds of their exports within 12 months of the outbound shipments. >> Read More

Orissa could revise a Rs.67,900 crore fine imposed on Tata Steel Ltd, Aditya Birla group’s Essel Mining and Industries Ltd and many other miners after talks with them conclude possibly this month, leading to some readjustment, according to a state government official.

Local search engine Just Dial, which recently raised Rs 950 crore in its IPO, will be listed on the stock exchanges Wednesday.

Government’s first issue of the 10-year inflation indexed bonds, which aims at discouraging gold investments, was today oversubscribed by more than four times, though only bids worth Rs 1,000 crore were accepted.

As per the RBI, which auctioned the ’10 Years Inflation Indexed Government Stock, 2023′, there were 167 competitive bids worth Rs 4,616 crore of which only 26 amounting to Rs 985.94 crore were accepted.

Also all the eight non-competitive bids by retail and mid-segment investors totalling Rs 14.06 crore were accepted, it said, adding the cut off-yield for the auction was fixed at 1.44 per cent. >> Read More

Overseas investors have pumped in more than Rs.22,000 crore (about $4 billion) in the Indian stock market in May, the highest level in three months.

The staggering inflow in May comes after a 16-month low net investment of Rs. 5,414 crore in April. With this, the total foreign investor investment in the country’s equity market has reached Rs.83,205 crore ($15.35 billion) since the beginning of 2013.

In May, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) were gross buyers of shares worth Rs. 74,469 crore, while they sold equities amounting to Rs.52,300 crore, translating into a net inflow of Rs. 22,168 crore ($4.04 billion), according to the data available with market regulator Sebi. >> Read More