Agarwal offers $1-bn to take Vedanta private Deal values co $3.07 bn, shareholders to get $10.89 a share in cash

Mining mogul Anil Agarwal's family trust on Tuesday made a firm $1 billion offer to buy 33.47 per cent non-promoter shares of Vedanta Resources in a deal that values the conglomerate at $3.07 billion.

"Under the terms of the offer, Vedanta shareholders will receive $10.89 per share in cash for each Vedanta share," the company said in a regulatory filing detailing about the $1 billion offer.

In addition, the shareholders will be entitled to receive the dividend of $0.41 per share in respect of the 12 months ended March 31, 2018.

"Taken together, the offer price and the FY2018 dividend in aggregate represent a total value of $11.30 per share, which on the basis of the announcement exchange rate represents an illustrative premium of approximately 32.4 per cent to the closing price of 647 pence per Vedanta share on June 29, 2018," it said. Vedanta had on July 2 announced Agarwal's plans to delist the company. Agarwal's Volcan Investments, which currently holds 66.53 per cent of Vedanta, made a cash offer for 825 pence a share.

Vedanta, which owns copper, aluminium, iron ore, oil and steel businesses, was the first Indian firm to list on LSE in 2003. It has lately been facing environmental pressure on its operations.

Agarwal, however, has denied any link between the delisting and the protests. There is "no link at all" with the Tuticorin incident, he had said earlier this month. "This is driven by the desire to simplify the corporate structure". In the stock exchange filing on Tuesday, Agarwal termed the offer as "a natural progression of our journey to simplify the Vedanta Group's corporate structure."

He said given the subsequent growth of underlying businesses and the maturity of the Indian capital markets, a separate London listing is no longer necessary to achieve the Vedanta Group's strategic objectives. | WEDNESDAY | AUGUST 1, 2018 The government's finances have shown improvement in the June quarter of 201819 with fiscal deficit working out to 68.7 per cent of the budget estimate, mainly on account of higher revenue collection, official data reveal.

The deficit was at 80.8 per cent of budget estimate in the April-June quarter of last fiscal.

In actual terms, the fiscal deficit or gap between the total expenditure and receipts was Rs 4.29 lakh crore.

The government had budgeted to cut fiscal deficit to 3.3 per cent of GDP in the current fiscal, from 3.53 per cent in 2017-18.