NEW DELHI: Mandated by the power ministry to chalk out PFC's public offer, Morgan Stanley has suggested that the company's paid-up capital of 10.3 billion be reduced by at least 60 percent to 4.12 billion before going in for a float of 10 or 15 percent of the remaining equity. "While the power ministry has given its approval and the planning commission also supports the idea, we are yet to get the final approval from the finance ministry," PFC chairman and managing director A.A. Khan said here Wednesday. Last month, the PFC had made a presentation to the finance ministry, which is yet to take a decision on the level of equity to be reduced and the size of the public float. The PFC also awaits a go ahead for setting up an India Power Fund, mooted over a year ago to help the country achieve its objective of doubling the power generation capacity by 2012 with the addition of 100,000 MW. The government has estimated a requirement of 8 trillion to meet the target. "The figure that is required to meet the additional power generation target is awesome. It is not within the capacity of any single source to fund this requirement. "We feel the India Power Fund could provide the required concessions to trigger the private sector investment," said Khan. He said PFC had appointed SBI Caps as advisor for creating a corpus of $5 billion and the final report was expected shortly. Disclosing details of the financial performance of the company, Khan said the net profit had surged by 37 percent to 10.67 billion in 2002-03 as against 7.78 billion in the previous year. During the 2002-03 fiscal, PFC sanctioned all-time high loans of 140.01 billion, an 86.7 percent increase over the target of 75 billion. The loan disbursements also touched an all-time high of 73.37 billion during the fiscal, which was 63.1 percent higher than the target of 45 billion. With a new emphasis on non-conventional energy sources, PFC had last year disbursed 4 billion for biomass and the wind energy project also. This focus was to be continued this year, said Khan.
Source: IANS