Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India may reconsider the date of Life Insurance Corporation of India’s inaugural share sale, according to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
“Ideally, I’d like to go ahead with it because we’d planned it for some time based purely on Indian considerations,” Sitharaman said in an interview to Bloomberg. “But if global considerations warrant that I need to look at it, I wouldn’t mind looking at it again,” she said.
The assessment might have an influence on the scheduling of India’s largest public offering, which made up the majority of the country’s $10.4 billion asset-sale programs targeted at reducing the fiscal deficit for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2022. The authorities had set a March deadline for the IPO, and its IPO prospectus, submitted on Feb. 13, placed the insurance giant’s embedded value at Rs 5.4 trillion.
“When a private sector promoter takes this call, he has to only explain this to the company’s board,” she said when asked if a decision to delay the IPO may be hampered by the government’s yearly disinvestment objectives. “But I would have to explain it to the whole world.”
