Ansari wants more

owned up to an old desire of getting rid of a major stake in his company Mid-Day Multimedia. But just when bidders like Bennett and Coleman and the Pune-based Sakaal group made their plans to bid he suddenly changed his mind! This was because Ansari had previously decided that he would only give away a majority stake if the bid price was in excess of his IPO price of Rs 70 per share. This didn’t happen, so the tycoon declared that equity for a minority stake would be given up for bidding. Due to this many bidders backed out immediately.

Ansari’s other interests lie in publishing, his portal Chalomumbai.com, his outdoor advertising business, his film production and his radio station. His radio station Go 92.5 FM is not really making waves as the tycoon is having to pay a licence fee of Rs.10 crore annually to the government. All he hopes for now is that after the elections, his profits will improve, as a new revenue sharing model will be launched. The tycoon, who launched his morning newspaper The Morning Quick, will now spend his time between squash games to ponder over whether pricing his stake high was a good move or not and what his next move should be.

Ruia now importing a power plant

Come June and with power outage the norm numerous power plants in India will hopefully be ready to be unveiled! Ten have already achieved financial closure, out of which some are the Dadri combined cycle power project by Reliance, the Raigargh project by Jindal Power in Madhya Pradesh and the Rosa thermal power project by Indo Gulf Fertilizers. Another belongs to the tycoon Shashi Ruia, that will be part of Essar Power. This will be located in Jamnagar, Gujarat and will be a 1,200 MW plant. The tycoon already had his existing Hazaria power plant that is successfully providing 7 per cent of the power in Gujarat, and now he is opening another plant at Vishakapatnam.

But the best bit of tattle has got to be that Ruia’s plan is to transfer a whole power plant from Scotland all the way to Gujarat! This he will achieve by dismantling an entire plant and setting it up in India, which alone will be a cool Rs.2.3 crore exercise. The plant will be run on residue from the refinery as its fuel source and will serve Gujarat and the neighbouring states. The good part about this is that the original plant in Scotland consists of two units of 600 MW each, in good workable condition and the cost of power generation by the reassembled unit has been estimated to be a very affordable Rs.1.80 per unit which is rather feasible. But right now the plan is still in the making, the tycoon still has to look into certain minute details before the plant’s journey to India can be confirmed.

Dilip Cherian, runs the public relations firm Perfect Relations. He is an economy watcher and tycoon tracker. The people he writes about are not clients. Send your insider dope to dilipcherian@now-india.net.in