ONGC Videsh, the overseas arm of the state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp, is close to securing the minimum threshold of shareholder acceptances for acquiring the UK-listed Imperial Energy, a report said.
OVL can walkout of the estimated 1.3 billion (USD 1.9 billion) deal to acquire Imperial, which has oilfields in Russia, if less than 90 per cent of Imperial shareholders accept its offer of 12.50 pounds a share by tomorrow afternoon (GMT).
“Imperial has received a flurry of acceptances from shareholders in the past few days, in spite of the Christmas holiday, and expects to receive more today, the final full day of business available,” the Financial Times reported on its website.
OVL is closing on the 90 per cent level of acceptances, FT said without saying where it got the information from.
In India, OVL remained tight-lipped on the transaction, offering no comments on the number of shares tendered so far.
There have been murmurs of ONGC looking at options to revise or withdraw the offer as returns have plummeted with the slide on crude oil prices.
The offer was made at a time when the international price of crude was hovering around USD 128 a barrel. Crude has since then shaved-off two-third of those levels, resulting in a drastic fall in returns to 3-4 per cent from 12.6 per cent estimated keeping crude oil price at USD 100 per barrel.
ONGC officers union has also opposed the deal saying Imperial had consistently failed to live-up the targeted crude oil production.
Association of Scientific and Technical Officers said Imperial’s crude production was much lower than its claimed output of 12,000 barrels per day and is in no position to meet the targeted output of 25,000 bpd by 2008-end.
