Vedanta founder to buy out miner

VeDANTA Resources’s founder plans to buy out the firm for around £800m.

Anil Agarwal’s family trust Volcan Investments owns about 67pc of the mining and metals business and plans to make an offer for the rest.

The trust said the move would help simplify the company, and access to London markets was no longer so important. Shares in Vedanta soared nearly 26.5pc, or 171.2p, to 818p yesterday at the prospect of the offer, which values the firm at around £2.3bn. Vedanta is being criticised in India after demonstrations against one of its copper smelters saw police kill 13 protesters.

The deal would see the firm delisted from the London Stock exchange.

Agarwal, 64, is 74th on the Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated fortune of £1.8bn.

He started his career as a scrap metal dealer. He bought a copper company in 1979 before setting up Vedanta which brought together several family businesses. It was the first Indian company to join the London Stock exchange in 2003.