The govt will
hold a meeting on 9th May to decide on setting up of proposed Sovereign
Fund of India that could be used, among other things, to buy overseas
assets for the benefit of the state-owned companies.
"A
meeting of Secretaries of 10 government departments to decide on the
nature of the Fund is slated on May 9. After this, the proposal has to
be vetted by the Union Cabinet," a top government official said.
Secretaries
in the ministries of finance, public enterprises, petroleum and natural
gas, and power would be attending the meeting, which will be headed by
Cabinet Secretary.
Besides other things, the meeting will decide on the management of the corpus of the fund.
The
government will have to take a call on whether the fund would be
managed by the selected public sector mutual funds or the Centre, the
official added.
As
per the proposed structure, the disinvestment corpus will be used for
investing in energy and raw material needs, recapitalisation of PSUs and
National Investment Fund (NIF).
"The DoD has proposed that the disinvestment proceeds be split into the three categories equally," the official added.
Currently
proceeds from disinvestment of CPSEs are channelised into the NIF which
is maintained outside the Consolidated Fund of India.
Prior
to the global economic crisis in 2008-09, 75 percent of the corpus of
NIF are utilised for social sector schemes and 25 percent for revival
for sick PSUs.
The NIF corpus is managed by three asset management companies -- UTI AMC, SBI Fund Managers and LIC AMC.
However,
since November 2009, the disinvestment proceeds are entirely routed to
Consolidated Fund to be used for funding social sector schemes.
Although the proposed Sovereign Fund is unlikely to be set up before 1st
April, 2013, the disinvestment department of the finance ministry is
trying to put across the proposal of efficient utilisation of the
proceeds from PSU stake sale so that even the state-owned companies can
obtain funds in times of need.
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