the daily economic update

June 25, 2010

Top stories
1. AUTO INDUSTRY STALWART DUBEY DRIVES TO BIRLAS: Rajiv Dubey, who headed the passenger car division in Tata motors resigned on may17 and will join the aditya Birla group as a director tasked with devising manufacturing and marketing strategies for the metal to telecom conglomerate. Dubey is widely credited with building Tata motor’s $4-billion passenger car business from scratch and has been associated with the same for around 27 years.
2. BSNL LASHES OUT AT TRAI FOR TAKING ONLY PRIVATE CALLS: state owned BSNL has accused TRAI of attempting to destroy the company by conniving with the private operators. This was regarding trai’s latest recommendations where it has said that BSNL holds 12.4MHz of airwaves in most service areas and has been underutilizing them. The regulator also calls for a withdrawal of 2.4 MHz of BSNL from all service areas. BSNL however maintains that the maximum airwaves it has held was 7.6 MHz in any area and that trai was fully aware of this and has issued wrong information to support its recommendations so that it can take away the spectrum from it and give it away to the private regulators (unitech, swan, STel and datacom) it issued licenses in 2008.
3. RIL IN ITS FINAL BID FOR THE SHALE GAS ASSETS IN USA HAS DECIDED TO “SHELL OUT” $ 1.3 BILLION TO PIONEER NATURAL RESOURCES AND PARTNER NEWPECK. This will be RIL’s second purchase of the shale gas asset.
4. RBI DICTAT MAY QUEER FII PITCH: the central bank has said that from july1, all the irrevocable payment commitments (IPCs) issued by the custodian banks to institution funds shall be treated as capital market exposure. Deutsche bank, Citibank, HSBC, standard chartered bank JPMorgan are some on the banks acting as custodians for the FIIs and issue guarantees to stock exchanges on their behalf. The banks maintain that there is very little risk involved and they can easily recover their money back and also fear that this move from the RBI could increase capital needs, transaction costs and cause a temporary liquidity crises.
5. INSURERS MUST STICK TO NORMS ON PRICING OF UNLISTED COMPANIES: according to the latest RBI norms, shares of unlisted companies can not be transferred at a price that is less than its fair value which in turn has to be calculated by a SEBI registered merchant banker or a CA via the discounted free cash flow methods. This would cause a rise in the value of insurance companies’ shares implying that the foreign investors will now have to shell out more to their Indian counterparts. IRDA had issued a statement last Thursday saying that these RBI norms are not applicable to insurance companies. However with the central bank insisting that these norms do apply to insurance cos. IRDA is expected to come out with a clarification soon.
6. Sensex falls down by .14% closing at 17730.24 on Thursday.

7. Nifty falls down by .05% closing at 5320.6 on Thursday.